Ocean's Echo

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Maxwell handled both of those sticking points (for me) very well, sidestepping something that would have made me put the book down and DNF right away. On the planet of Orshan, where this book takes place, past experimentation with neuroaugments have led to some people being born with special abilities: Architects are those who can influence your thoughts, and Readers are those who can read minds as well as navigate chaotic space.

Melodramatic and filled with MacGuffins galore in the form of remnants, to the point where I finished for the sake of finishing. They have to fight battles, get embroiled in treason and everything is just a lot bigger and more dramatic, while trying to convey background lore that I don’t think we needed to know yet. In the pervious book the foremost threat in the book comes in from a Auditor threatening to take away the treaty that was protecting them from invasion and the two main characters were just normal people reacting to that. They are allowed to be messy, to be wrong about certain things, to grow and to learn, to make their own choices individually and together.There’s a little bit of the “and they were roomates” trope to kick of their reluctant partnership, which only strengthened my fondness for these two idiots.

There are several great side characters with their own personalities and goals, and the snarky interactions between Tennal and Istara in particular were fun to read. The kind of surprising thing to me is I also did not like her first novel (maybe I should go back and up it one star because it is better than this one), and here I go again trying her second novel.They weren’t slinging around mental commands at the bar or anything, but Tennal could see it: architects gave off an aura, if you knew how to look for it, like light radiating from a star. The author on acknowledgments thanks many many many people, including presumably two editors, and big teams at two publishing houses (Tor US and Orbit UK). It is not even a slow slow burn, Mariana Zapata style despite the first kiss or whatever being at 88% of the book it is that I am not sure there is any kind of burn.