Aurora Rising (The Aurora Cycle, #1) by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

My rating: four stars

Genre: YA, Sci-fi

Edition: audiobook

Goodreads Summary: The year is 2380, and the graduating cadets of Aurora Academy are being assigned their first missions. Star pupil Tyler Jones is ready to recruit the squad of his dreams, but his own boneheaded heroism sees him stuck with the dregs nobody else in the Academy would touch…

A cocky diplomat with a black belt in sarcasm

A sociopath scientist with a fondness for shooting her bunkmates

A smart-ass techwiz with the galaxy’s biggest chip on his shoulder

An alien warrior with anger management issues

A tomboy pilot who’s totally not into him, in case you were wondering

And Ty’s squad isn’t even his biggest problem—that’d be Aurora Jie-Lin O’Malley, the girl he’s just rescued from interdimensional space. Trapped in cryo-sleep for two centuries, Auri is a girl out of time and out of her depth. But she could be the catalyst that starts a war millions of years in the making, and Tyler’s squad of losers, discipline-cases and misfits might just be the last hope for the entire galaxy.

I am going to be honest and say that I don’t usually read space-themed books, however, this book has been all over BookTube and so I just had to see what all of the talk was about. 

Likes: One, the audiobook was really good! I don’t think I have listened to a full cast audiobook before and it helped me comprehend who was who so much easier than one-reader audiobooks! As for the story, one aspect that I appreciate is how there isn’t an automatic set romantic couple. It seemed like all of the characters had some sort of connection and chemistry with each other. There weren’t automatic “couples”, which was fun because it truly allows the reader to put characters that they like together instead of the author doing it for them. This doesn’t often happen in books and I found it refreshing! Especially since romance wasn’t a main theme in the book, so it allowed a lot to the imagination in terms of who should be with who. The pacing was also pretty good. It was a little slow at parts but the majority of the pacing was fast and the slow parts made sense and didn’t last too long. The mystery behind Aurora was intriguing and I enjoyed how I would get snippets of information throughout the whole story instead of no information the whole time and then all of it at the end. I tend to like the styles where I get some information throughout and then at the end I get a larger influx. 

Dislikes: The ending was great, don’t get me wrong. It was just a little much for me. So much happened at the end, and a lot of it was just so different from the rest of the book it unnerved me. All of a sudden, so many different elements were added to the story and the pace ramped up a crazy amount. I still enjoyed where they went with the ending, I guess it was just so unexpected and sudden that I couldn’t feel a deep connection to the book. 

Overall, this was a great read that I would definitely recommend! The difference between a four and five star read for me is honestly just a feeling. If I love the book and don’t really have anything wrong with it, but don’t feel a deep connection to the book, it will get four stars. I need that feeling of loving the book and wanting to read it again to give it five stars. For some unknown reason I just didn’t feel that way about this book, which is why I gave it four stars.