Zenith
Year: 2018
Authors: Sasha Alsberg & Lindsay Cummings
Length: 512 pages
***THIS BOOK WAS RECEIVED FROM A GOODREADS GIVEAWAY***
Every once in a while, I’ll read a book which is basically the equivalent of literary “candy.” It hits all the tropes of its genre, most of its twists are predictable, and the whole thing is purely entertainment for entertainment’s sake. Zenith, the first book in the Androma Saga, is just such a book. This book has been described as an all-female Guardians of the Galaxy, and I would tend to agree with that assessment. Overall, it’s a fun book, but there’s not too much substance to it aside from the typical space opera Young Adult romance. If anything, it proves why the tropes of its genres work the way they do.
The writing itself in this book is easy to read, which helped me crank through its 500 pages in just my lunch breaks and time at the gym. Even if I wasn’t paying too much attention, much of the book had a lot of redundant parts to its narrative, so I picked up on what I might have missed several times. In fact, with the number of flashbacks peppered throughout the manuscript, I felt this could have been easily distilled down to 400 pages at least. Still, most of the characters were engaging, which made it enjoyable to keep reading.
Of course, not all of the characters felt wholly fleshed out to me. The main character is a given, and both her former lover and her spaceship pilot had well-rounded backstories. However, the two remaining members of the main character’s crew almost felt interchangeable. I had trouble remembering which one was the giant and which one was the fast little girl, mostly because they were only there as background for the spaceship. Even a few of the minor characters felt more real than these two. Either way, by the end of the book, things actually started happening, and the cliffhanger ending left me wanting to know what happens next.
A Young Adult space opera that is as entertaining as it is predictable, I give Zenith 3.5 stars out of 5.
