Illuminae by Amie Kaufman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I really liked this book. I liked the story, the world building and the characters. There was some very thoughtful stuff in there. There’s action and tension and the real sense of danger you don’t get from a lot of books without being over the top.
This book also brought up some questions that are worthy of discussion from a publishing point of view. It was an interesting choice to put the story forward as a series of found documents and compiled messages or reports. That certainly helped the speed of the book, a very quick read. What didn’t work for me was the tiny font that actually carried story information across waves or swirls or ship patterns.
To be fair about this – I was reading on an electronic device. That might make a difference. IF I had been reading a hard copy of the book, perhaps the swirls and such would have had a better feel. As it was, even when I attempted to use the e-reader’s ability to make fonts larger or zoom on pictures it was a fail. There were parts of the story I missed just because I couldn’t read it. That was very frustrating.
IF you’re going to get a copy of this book I recommend it for the story, but not so much for the layout.