I got Better World as a free book and it had such well developed characters and such an intriguing premise that I quickly bought this box set to save a little money on the next two installments of this series.
All three books feature people facing the same dire circumstances but handling it each in their own way. The pace is steady and I found all three to be in the 'quick read' category for me.
Better World hooked me in. Maeve is such an interesting character and her story was so compelling I could forgive the author for bungling the volunteering moment - I knew it was coming but then we had to go through what seemed to me like the pretense of an unnecessary twist to make it seem less obvious. One could also make the case that Maeve is a type of unreliable narrator because we mostly follow her POV. Some of the descriptions are very weak and/or confusing. I still don't know how the bar thing and machinery might look or work and I get that the crew doesn't know how it works either and yet they are tasked with making it operational. I wish the author had done more to fill in the backstory here like maybe before the last jump they lost a lot of people rather quickly and a lot of knowledge was lost with them - it could have set up/raised the stakes for the next book which features recorded knowledge much more.
Legacy Code follows a gal named Era and because of the 'Fractured Era' name for the series I found myself paying more attention to contextual implications around that name/term. At times the name seemed to reflect the fact that this era of human history is quite fractured with a spectrum of factions at odds with each other in a much more subtle and obtuse way than the contentiousness of our own political era. On the personal level though Era is very fractured in her thinking and her outlook. She's obviously hormonal and ill equipped to see her situation or the 'secrets' she uncovers in any type of rational manner. She has no emotional rectitude and no rational understanding of logic. She edits out the most important parts of a video she steals from the historical archives in a manic and ultimately futile attempt to save her unborn baby. She latches on to her own misinterpretations and misunderstandings as if everyone will feel as equally outraged by the 'secret' she uncovered. I'm still not even entirely sure if it was much of a new secret or just something no one really talks about openly or acknowledges. I often found myself rooting for her because I have compassion for a mother doing anything she can to save her baby but I never believed she was fighting a righteous or noble fight and I often found myself empathizing with the 2 out of 5 mothers that Era wanted to condemn to the very predicament she was trying to avoid for herself. The ending seemed rather abrupt with lots of loose ends in the narrative so this is the perfect way to buy this book - so you can immediately begin the next installment!
Paragon is a really great 'who dunnit' with nothing less at stake than the survival of the entire fleet and the last vestiges of humanity. I really want to know why there's no psych units on medlevel. PTSD seems to be rampant with everyone at every level nursing their wounds in the most unhealthy ways. With only about half the pregnancies going to term I'm shocked that doulas never materialized or morphed their duties to act as grief counselors. The only official means the command structure seems to have to address the emotional crises running rampant in the fleet seems to be grimp. It's still not clear to me why they don't just put a form of it in some kind of quin. Yes, I know it can be highly addictive with many damaging and painful side effects during withdrawal, but doesn't that just make the case for a continuous, never ending low dose for everyone? Maybe avoiding grimp could be some kind of luxury like lavender soap. As it is, some people twist their grief and the emotional burdens of their losses into anger which leads to revenge. In their situation I'm sure revenge must seem like such a relief, like it's a beacon of hope but ultimately it's a false hope that only further increases loss/pain/grief and sadness for everyone. Tadeo's investigations reveal a lot of things I expect the author to cover in subsequent installments of this series and as such I'm eager to read book #4
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Top reviews from other countries
Kindle Customer
Glad I read the books. Looking forward to more!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 19, 2016
Ryan Toxopeus
Excellent story. Wish the author was working on the next one, and not a bloody prequel when she left such a cliffhanger.
Reviewed in Canada on October 21, 2016