Light Years Book Review

Light Years by Kass Morgan

From Goodreads: Reeling from the latest attack by a mysterious enemy, the Quatra Fleet Academy is finally admitting students from every planet in the solar system after centuries of exclusivity.

These cadets will have to put their differences aside and become a team to defend their world from a cunning enemy – but the danger might be lurking closer to home than they think… 

I’ll be honest here, I only really read this book because it came in an Illumicrate box. I’m not the biggest fan of sci-fi, and I tend to be picky about what I purchase, but since it was in the box and all, I figured I’d at least give it a try.

First up, the book started out pretty promising. I liked some of the characters and was keen to find out more. It was very packed with exposition, it all but oozed out of the page, but I suspected that might have been because it was attempting to worldbuild and push readers firmly into the unknown. Alas, this whole tell rather than show thing continued throughout Light Years, making me wince several times over. Sci-fi is a difficult genre to master on that front, sometimes you need to overexplain something so that readers understand and can skip to the super complex stuff a little later on, but this book really just waffled a lot of the time and I quickly lost interest.

Some of the worldbuilding was, admittedly, pretty cool. I enjoyed reading about all the different planets and the tensions between them, as well as seeing how all this played out in such a confined setting. I definitely want to know where Kass Morgan will take this next in terms of locations and things.

Like I said, the characters also started out interesting. I liked almost all of them, but I especially enjoyed Cormak’s chapters and Orelia’s perspective. They’re both hiding some huge secrets, and a lot of the reason why I kept pushing to finish this book was to find out how things unfolded as a consequence of all this. Unfortunately, again I was left a little flummoxed and underwhelmed. While both characters have some pretty major things going on with them, when secrets begin to unravel…nothing much happens. Cormak’s plot is, admittedly, clearly not entirely resolved yet, but some of the minor fallout problems that result from this issue are met with a shrug of the shoulders level reaction. Similarly with Orelia. She does something that she’s apparently pretty torn up about, but then she basically just ignores the issue and just goes about her merry business. And sure, denial is a thing, but there’s a big difference between denial and the author getting about two thirds of the way through the book and suddenly remembering the major event/choice that’s meant to be going on. It didn’t add anything to Orelia’s character. In fact, in a way it kind of cheapened it, because by basically never bringing up the apparently traumatic, heart-wrenching choice she had to make, it’s almost like she’s forgotten about it, and that comes across as very callous. While this all sounds very vague, considering I’m determined not to spoil a book that hasn’t been released yet, I’m sure there will be several readers who will see what I mean when they get to her choice.

My biggest gripe with this book though, had to be the romantic relationships. There are three of them throughout the book, and it really just feels like the author is shoving characters together because she doesn’t want anyone to be left alone. This is definitely expounded by the fact that the three relationships begin within several chapters of each other, and then, towards the end of the book, it looks like all three of them end almost simultaneously. And since they all include at least one main character [all of whom are connected to one another] it just didn’t strike me as real. I’m guessing we were meant to feel devastated when the break ups happened, but honestly I just wanted them to not be there at all. They were mostly very predictable, very tropey and not very interesting. And again, rather than adding something to each of the main characters in them, it felt like it was taking something away from them. It left me feeling a bit irritated and to be honest this is probably the main reason I’m not going to be picking up book two in the series.

Overall, I’m giving Light Years a 5/10. It was quite well written and the worldbuilding was strong, but the romantic relationships were eye-rollingly predictable and I got irked enough by them that I ended up deducting several stars for it. Also, I definitely think the book would have benefitted from less telling and more showing.

Light Years is expected to be released October 9th in the UK.

Has anyone else read this book or plans to read it? What do you think? I love to hear your thoughts and opinions on books I’ve read and reviewed so please feel free to leave a comment in the comment section below <3