Originally posted on GoodReads.

Synopsis: Kady thought breaking up with Ezra was the worst thing she'd ever been through. That was before her planet was invaded. Now, with enemy fire raining down on them, Kady and Ezra are forced to fight their way onto one of the evacuating craft, with an enemy warship in hot pursuit.

But the warship could be the least of their problems. A deadly plague has broken out and is mutating, with terrifying results; the fleet's AI, which should be protecting them, may actually be their biggest threat; and nobody in charge will say what's really going on. As Kady plunges into a web of data hacking to get to the truth, it's clear only one person can help her bring it all to light: Ezra.

Told through a fascinating dossier of hacked documents--including emails, schematics, military files, IMs, medical reports, interviews, and more--Illuminae is the first book in a heart-stopping, high-octane trilogy about lives interrupted, the price of truth, and the courage of everyday heroes.

Rating: 5/5

After the not-so-great experience I had with Aurora Rising (see that review here), I went on GoodReads to look at what others had said about the book and The Illuminae Files series kept coming up — as to be expected since said trilogy was Kaufman and Kristoff's previous work together. So, I decided to give it a go because, based off of the perspectives I was seeing, it seemed as if there were two crowds of people: 1) K&K fans who had read The Illuminae Files and LOVED Aurora Rising (for what reason is up to them, I'm not going to speculate) and 2) K&K fans who had read The Illuminae Files and HATED Aurora Rising (this crowd had similar reasons I had — more blatantly stated, they were disappointed in a perceived lower quality of character development, writing, and plot from authors they were familiar with the works of).

I'm not going to lie, I can see where that second crowd is coming from now that I've read Illuminae.

I'll tackle three points to keep this structured: format, characters, and plot. But I'll jump around everywhere because I can't separate them, and that's kind of what made the book really good for me. You can't talk about how good the format was without bringing up the characters in the format, you can't talk about how good the characters were without bringing up the plot— you get what I'm saying.

And here's the thing I personally believe about any media: if you remove one small element of it and it doesn't completely fall apart or you substitute one element of it and it doesn't fall apart, then it's not... good. That may be a controversial opinion that seems disagreeable, so feel free to disagree. The way I see it (tangent coming) is — say you take Cinderella out of her story. Make her rich. Take out the evil stepmother. Take out the midnight clock. Take out the glass slipper. Change something about the plot or the characters, and it's no longer Cinderella. It may be a retelling or a new spin or something new entirely, but it's not the original story anymore. On the other hand, take something that's basic in media. I won't name anything in particular, but I'll suggest thinking about your typical teen drama show or some action movie with generic plot — those pieces of media won't fall apart if you switch out or change things because there's no strong foundation. Cinderella works because the pieces are all tied together, like one of those set-ups where the toothpicks all rely on each other so if you take one out, they all fall. That's a good story, in my opinion.

Back on-track. That's where Illuminae really shines for me (and I'll bring up a couple of counterpoints with Aurora Rising, which may get annoying, but, you know, I read this book just because I was dissatisfied with the other one, so what're you going to do). Kady and Ezra are... pretty stereotypical, I think. Kady's the geeky, cynical hacker girl, and Ezra's the romantic, do-good farm boy (miner... boy?) — they're Katniss and Peeta. They're "badass girl does something awesome while her lover boyfriend holds her flower and watches in awe". That's how they read, simply (yes, I know Ezra does some great things in the book, too, I love him, I'm not hating on him). And, you know what? I'm not bothered that they're stereotypical. I'm not bothered that I don't really know much about them. I don't know their favorite colors or what they want to be when they grow up. I know Ezra didn't want to go to college offplanet with Kady because [redacted]. I know that Ezra [redacted]. I know that Kady [redacted]. And a lot of this is done through telling. It's a dossier-format book. Every file, every page tells me something. And, unlike Aurora Rising, I was totally okay with it.

Because it all tied together. Toothpicks supporting each other. Yes, the plot is stereotypical. It's very much like a movie I watched and hated called [redacted]. Yes, the characters are lovesick teenagers who are awesome and are doing WAY too much for their age. Yes, they're badass. Yes, they're very sarcastic and witty. And so was Aurora Rising — but AR did too much. Illuminae did just enough. I might not know every intimate detail of Kady and Ezra's lives, but I know enough, and I still cried over [redacted] and [redacted] and [redacted]. I did see a lot of recycled tropes from science fiction, just like in AR, but the difference was that it wasn't too much. The formatting, admittedly, helped a whole lot; it was new and refreshing to me as someone who's only read a non-novel format in a novel once (one day I'll do a review of Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad but today isn't that day), and it made everything else feel new.

And, oh, boy, the CHARACTERS. I felt for them. I was hoping they wouldn't die. Some definitely do — the ones I expected and the ones I didn't expect, but I grieved for them all the same. I kept track of what pages I felt what emotions on, and, to be completely honest, by page 190 of Aurora Rising, I got the first morsel of alien lore that I loved. By page 170 of Illuminae, I was already invested in all of the characters, and I was terrified for the 429 pages that were still left.

So, yeah, I do understand where that second crowd of reviewers came from, now having read Kaufman & Kristoff's previous trilogy after the fact. They did amazing things in this book, recycled some age-old tropes and characters and plots and made them feel new again.

Samuel Johnson once said, “The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.” I'm still a little baffled as to how K&K were able to do that with Illuminae yet, for me, struck out on Aurora Rising, but you can't have everything, you know? As for now, I can't wait to start reading the sequel, Gemina, so stay tuned for my review of that.