Has anybody heard of this book? Technically, it's a science fiction book, but most bookstores (including Amazon on their web site) are lumping it in "young adult." This may be unfair, because I think more than teenagers are going to want to read this, and it's one of the most unusual books I've ever read so far.
I was trying to find it at Amazon, but I forgot the title and author, so I thought doing a google search of what I knew would help me. It didn't. Maybe because one of the terms I consistently used in my searches was "alien invasion" and that's clearly not the case. For example, let's say Doctor Who picked up some passengers in 15th century France, and dropped them off half a millenium in the future at the beginning of either World War. (Doesn't matter which one.) From the perspective of the terrified middle aged peasants, the Germans invading France with 20th century weapons might as well be the Daleks or Cybermen, but to contemporaries, they aren't not aliens but a*****e human beings from a neighboring country. In Illuminae, the a******s in question come from a corporation who wants to shut down the illegal mining operation from a competitor, but rather than sick the government dogs to have the mining shut down, they send their own battleships (or star destroyers) to kill everyone in the mining company. When a bone fide government battleship happens to hail the colony's distress signal, they open fire on that. Anyway, the surviving colonists are on the damaged gov't ship, a science ship, and a cargo freighter and since they can't jump into hyperspace, it's going to take them six months to reach a wormhole that will take them someplace where they can get back into civilization. This isn't going to be easy because the bad guys still have a battleship left and it's hunting them down. Haven't got around to mentioning "Juliet" and "Romeo" (which is why this is listed in "young adult"), but they're the eyes through which we see everything.
Enough plot summary. What makes this book unique is that it isn't written prose style. It's made up as a series of interviews, e-mails, and logs which slowly tell the story. There are lots of graphics, which means that while you CAN get the kindle edition, this will be easier to read on a tablet and you still might want to prefer to get the hardcover. Here are some examples of the pages:
In the end, this may just be a cheap gimmick, but I'm going to give it a go. Has anybody else read or heard of it? Thanks!
