Welcome back, Readers! We’ve got the third installment of Lindsay Ellis’s fantastic first contact novel series today! It released in June so I was a little annoyed that I wasn’t getting to it till August… though, this Spotlight is still out before there’s a Wikipedia article! I’ll take that minor W.
If you’re not familiar with the series, it starts with Axiom’s End Here and carries on into Truth of the Divine Here and both are very much recommended by me.
This series is one that you really can’t jump into at the second or third installment without being pretty well lost so you’re going to want to read the prior entries before this one. Here’s a brief refresher, though; The long and the short of it is, we’ve made first contact with a race of biomechanical aliens called the amygdaline. They look something like a mix of mechanical mantis and velociraptor and their psychology is entirely alien to us. A big part of the first two novels is a young lady by the name of Cora Sabino trying to bridge the gap between human and amygdaline ways of thinking and existing while she functions as official interpreter for one of these aliens, known as Ampersand. Needless to say, this is quite the task! This novel throws in an additional wrinkle in that there’s another alien race on earth…
So! Let’s go check it out!
Book Stats
- Author: Lindsay Ellis.
Formats: Hardcover, Kindle, and Audible.
Price: $20.44 for Hardcover, $14.99 for Kindle, and $21.65 for Audible.
Length: 464 pages or 16 hours 19 minutes in audio format.
Narrator: Abigail Thorn, Angel Pean, Neil Hellegers, & Stephanie Willis
Number of books in the series: 3 at the time of writing.
Basic Premise
We open in a village in the Phillipines. A demon is pursuing one of the local boys. It can tear flesh effortlessly and crush bones in its jaws. It kills several people before they manage to bludgeon it to death in turn.
Of course, we know that this is an alien and not a demon. This raises a lot of questions.
Meanwhile, Cora and Ampersand are living in relative luxury in Fukushima prefecture, Japan. A billionaire there has offered them a safe home as Japan has recognized the personhood of amygdalines. A good start! And, also, great for Cora as she’s a newly minted celebrity due to a photo taken of her shielding Ampersand and Nikola (Another amygdaline) from a gunman with her own body. The photo is known as Human Shield and has made her extremely easily recognized. Having a place to go that’s remote and hidden is a boon.
She’s attending classes and starting to build herself back up after the murder of her lover, Kaveh Mazandarani. It’s not been easy, but she’s managing. The feelings she’s developing for Kaveh’s dear friend and protege Paris Wells are helping. What isn’t is Ampersand’s insistence on using a form of in-depth communication called high speech. Think Vulcan mind meld, but instead of a logical humanoid, this melding involves a centuries old creature that is so distant and alien, cosmic horror is the only way to describe his mindscape.
There’s a lot going on. And when it turns out that the attack in the Phillipines wasn’t perpetrated by an amygdaline but one of their mortal enemies? Things get even more hectic. These aliens have been here for decades and they have the means to wipe humanity off the map… they just haven’t had cause to. Until now.
Can humanity be saved? Because we’re not exactly great self-advocates in the eyes of these aliens…
You’ll have to read to find out!
My Take
I enjoyed this entry in the series! It’s got a lot going on and we had a pretty distinct shift in that Paris gets a lot of chapters where she is our POV character. I liked that a lot as she’s a reporter, is working with Nikola and therefore offers a drastically different feel in her chapters when compared to Cora or Sol’s chapters.
We also get to spend a lot of time with the new aliens, the physeterines. A sister species to the amygdalines in the same way Neanderthals were a sister species to our own early ancestors. (This is a gross simplification but you get the idea.) I don’t want to spoil too much but these are fantastic beings. I’d happily spend a whole book with them.
Also! Cora tries to think of a list of the least evil countries and New Zealand gets top billing. It’s appreciated! (And also correct.) Also appreciated is her use of the term Kiwi. This Aotearoa ex-pat loves to see it!
I listened to the Audibe version. We have many of the same narrators as the prior two entries; Abigail Thorn, Neil Hellegers and Stephanie Willis. They do a just as great a job in this entry as they have in the prior two. Paris’s chapters are narrated by Angel Pean and she does wonderfully, especially in later chapters where there’s a real sense of fear, urgency and compassion. I’m definitely going to check out more of her work in the near future.
This is supposed to be a five book series and there’s some huge plot threads we haven’t even begun to pull on yet that have me waiting for more. I’m very much looking forward to book four!
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