Book Review: Axiom's End

Lindsay Ellis's novel, Axiom's End, follows Cora Sabino in an alternate history where - due to leaks from Cora's father, Nils Ortega - it is discovered that humans have made contact with an alien intelligence.  Cora finds herself interacting with her government and the intelligence after being briefly abducted.

So, I want to be upfront: I generally liked this book, but I have some issues.  Some of these issues could conceivably be addressed in the follow-up to this (it is part of a series, no idea how many), although some might just be an ongoing issue I have with the series - and one cannot be fixed.  So while this review will probably read as negative, it isn't.

The main issue I had with regard to the book was the agency of the main character.  While Cora is a great character - seriously, Ellis did a wonderful job crafting her - very little of the book is driven by her actions.  While this makes sense, it limits the reader's engagement in the action surrounding the character since she is basically thrown from scenario to scenario and reacts without having any real power to change her situation.  Even the action climax of the book reduces her participation to a degree that is unsatisfying since this is the only character we get any sort of inner thought process for.

This bleeds a little bit into the main alien character, Ampersand.  The readers need to be invested in this character, or at least invested in the relationship between them and Cora, but the opaqueness of the character makes it hard to do so.  Again, this is a specific choice made by Ellis, and it makes sense within the novel, but I can't help but feel that we needed more - more what, I'm not sure, but something to get us attached to this alien character.

There are several side characters - Luciana, Kaplan - that have the appearance of larger roles in the later books, and Ellis does a great job of crafting these characters through the viewpoint of Cora.  The reader's opinion of them is likely influenced by Cora's opinion, but there is room for there to be more to the characters than what Cora thinks of them.

The book has a quick pace - possibly a little too quick? - and the reader will not want for action.  Ellis does an excellent job of explaining what happens - a decent amount of the action uses alien technology, which had to be a challenge - without getting too caught up in details.  This somewhat overshadows the background political subplot, which really feels like it should be more relevant, but again - that might be a larger plot point in the next novel.

Which brings me to the unfixable issue I had with this novel - the ending.  One of the challenges of writing a multi-novel series is making sure that each individual novel has it's own individual plot while still having an overarching plot that connects all the novels together, and it feels like Axiom's End has too abrupt an ending without having the emotional climax that is needed to push the reader into the next novel.  It's so abrupt that it almost feels like the novel is unfinished - something is missing from the ending to bring it to a proper end.

I would recommend this book, despite my critiques of it because I do think Ellis is capable of addressing the majority of the issues I bring up - it wouldn't surprise me if she already had in the writing of the sequel.  This is a review that I could very easily see me revisiting and changing the score based off the later novels.

For now, 3.5 out of 5

Author Links:

No author link yet, but here is her YouTube page - I highly recommend watching her video essays.