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A review by sagareads
The Last Gifts of the Universe by Riley August
adventurous
emotional
inspiring
sad
tense
- Loveable characters? No
2.75
While this book eventually came around to a somewhat emotionally resonant if unsatisfying conclusion (spoiler: they don't find out what's killing the planets ), it had such enormous flaws that I only got there by telling myself "it's pretty short, just go ahead and finish."
My first and most obvious complaint is that from the very beginning, the main characters take their cat along with them on expeditions to dangerous dead planets. They don't even put him on a leash! No matter how cute he looks in his little kitty spacesuit, it's hard to believe that he hasn't gotten himself and likely one or more of his human family killed by now. It's a spectacularly stupid decision for his sake and their own.
Speaking of spectacularly stupid, I wish the author had made it clearer much earlier in the book that the narrator's mother had died recently, within the last year. Realizing how new and raw the narrator's grief really recontextualized their character. Previously, I found their overwrought emotions and irrational behavior tiresome, but these traits made much more sense -- and felt much more sympathetic and meaningful -- for someone recently bereaved. I wish I had understood that background earlier instead of spending over half the book annoyed at the narrator and wishing I could read their younger brother's perspective instead.
Finally, I really disliked the complete lack of thought and creativity put into the one alien culture depicted. The author inserted a few pieces of sci fi window dressing into a very generic contemporary white collar American culture, down to the alien character struggling to job hunt after an ego-bruising graduate thesis review. This doesn't even begin to express the scope and variation of human culture, let alone what we could expect to find among an alien species! Given this lack of world-building, I found it especially jarring and grating that the author tried to make a point of the main character realizing they had mistranslated a cultural nuance and altering their attitude based on their corrected translation.
My first and most obvious complaint is that from the very beginning, the main characters take their cat along with them on expeditions to dangerous dead planets. They don't even put him on a leash! No matter how cute he looks in his little kitty spacesuit, it's hard to believe that he hasn't gotten himself and likely one or more of his human family killed by now. It's a spectacularly stupid decision for his sake and their own.
Speaking of spectacularly stupid, I wish the author had made it clearer much earlier in the book that the narrator's mother had died recently, within the last year. Realizing how new and raw the narrator's grief really recontextualized their character. Previously, I found their overwrought emotions and irrational behavior tiresome, but these traits made much more sense -- and felt much more sympathetic and meaningful -- for someone recently bereaved. I wish I had understood that background earlier instead of spending over half the book annoyed at the narrator and wishing I could read their younger brother's perspective instead.
Finally, I really disliked the complete lack of thought and creativity put into the one alien culture depicted. The author inserted a few pieces of sci fi window dressing into a very generic contemporary white collar American culture, down to the alien character struggling to job hunt after an ego-bruising graduate thesis review. This doesn't even begin to express the scope and variation of human culture, let alone what we could expect to find among an alien species! Given this lack of world-building, I found it especially jarring and grating that the author tried to make a point of the main character realizing they had mistranslated a cultural nuance and altering their attitude based on their corrected translation.