Publisher: Knopf Books
Page Count: 608

Gemina is the sequel to Illuminae (click here to read my review) and I was lucky enough to read it with my blogging friend Marie @Drizzle and Hurricane Books! Just like with its predecessor, there was some crazy stuff going on and I was really glad I had someone to freak out with.

This series is incredibly difficult to review without spoiling it. So, I won’t even really attempt to talk about what is going on in terms of plot. Go an experience it for yourself! What I can say, is that I would like to be able to tell you that I was surprised by what happened, but I think Marie can attest to me predicting or sensing that something would happen at least 90% of the time. There is really no way of telling if that was just me or if it was easier to guess now that I knew how the authors worked from what I read in Illuminae, but it was still full of twists and turns and I had a lot of fun!

I actually liked Gemina better than Illuminae somehow. I clicked with the new characters way faster, but fear not, our old heroes and villains make plenty of appearances. And while I still am not able to see the entire big picture here, I love how everything is connected. It’s quite a massive book, but the format just makes it so much easier to breeze through the whole thing in very little time. There were less schematics and more doodles and sketches from a journal, which helped me personally a lot. I think that I got confused with all the different ships last time around. However, I still think that it’s a shame they don’t offer the book in colour. I would definitely be willing to pay more for a chance to have it really be even more astounding.

While, as I said, I enjoyed the format again, there were also a couple things about it I had issues with. For one, a couple of the last chapters felt incredibly repetitive for reasons I cannot go into detail with. It was fun and made sense at first, but it simply dragged on for too long and I was actually happy when that part of the story was over. And second, it sometimes was printed in such a dark colour on dark background that it was near impossible to read (seriously! WHYYY?). I get that that’s sometimes on purpose, but not in a regular chat room conversation. Maybe I had a weirdly printed version, but if that’s a general issue, they should definitely work on that for the finale.

Speaking of which – I cannot wait to see what this all leads to and how it ends for all those characters that have really grown on me!

Fazit: 4.5 stars! It was even better than Illuminae, which I so didn’t expect. I AM READY FOR THE FINALE!

Now that I’ve successfully said basically nothing about the book, how do you feel? Have you read Gemina already? Are you going to?