Review: Aurora Burning by Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff (Spoiler Alert)

I'm mad. I am obsessed with the first book in this series, but this one had so many issues!!! I still care about these characters and I want to know what happens in the next book (mostly bc of the nasty cliffhanger 🙄 seriously tho, is ending in the MIDDLE OF A SCENE ever okay?), but wow this installment was all over the place. The Bad - definitely suffers from middle book syndrome; there isn't really a plot, it's just getting you to the ending - therefore it's not very engaging and took me WAY too long to read - the beginning was hard to get into, we jumped around a lot with little background information - the crew's reaction to Kal's reveal legit made no sense and was definitely only there to get Kal to the location they wanted him to be for the ending - a lot of the lines in these books are over the top and add humor, which was effective in book one, but in this one a lot of them were wayyyy too forced - the chapters about Kal and Auri were so boring omg, they just don't have chemistry i'm sorry - so many plot twists were brought up but then seemed to have no consequence to the story yet (why tell us that Tyler is half Syldrathi if it does nothing?? I'm sure it will in the next book but why not save that for then??) - there were several blatant typos including misspelling a character's name... (Saedi instead of Saedii) - the cliffhanger... why... literally the ending scene could have been the midway point of this book; this def could have been a duology - overall this should have been condensed and edited more thoroughly The Good - Tyler's chapters were great and his dynamic with Saedii, while again forced, was much more interesting - Zila and Finian are still great and I wish we got more about them - I like Scarlett's relationship with Finian, but her narrative in this was trying a little too hard to read naturally (ik that's the point, but again, it worked well in book one, but went over the edge in this one) - the space aspect is still rly fun and immersive - Imagery in these books is really strong; I always feel like I can see every single scene playing out in my head like a movie So... yeah. I'll still read book three, but this was disappointing.

Song I was reminded of while reading: Burnin' Up