Rating: 3/5
Spoiler Alert! I've done things a little different this time round and kept all the spoilers for a section at the bottom, meaning the first half of this review is spoiler free! And don't worry, there's a note about where to stop reading if you don't want to know what happens.
Last week I spoke about my first readalong experience, so it only seemed right to give a review of the book we read together! The Unsound Theory is the first of a trilogy called STARs Academy, by Emilia Zeeland.
Opening's are tough. They have so many roles to play in a story; they introduce the main characters, they have to draw the reader in and get them hooked, they have to explain just enough about the world that the reader understands what's happening, and they kind of set the precedent for the whole book. So writing an opening is never easy. But I have to admit, the weakest part of The Unsound Theory is it's opening. I found it confusing and felt like I needed context way before it was offered.
The whole first chapter felt rushed; as
the reader, we are hurriedly introduced to the main character, given no context for where she is or where is going, and then thrown straight into the main plot when she is given an invitation to STAR Academy. Not too bad on the face of it, but there is talk about "something" and implication about selling drugs, as well as an introduction to Yelna's legal guardian. This all massively confused me. There's so little explanation given about Yalena's guardian and why their house is so protected or about the implication that drug lords are a big problem on Earth. Instead, we jump straight into an explanation about Yalena being found in space as a baby. Important information, sure, but I felt it could have been revealed a little bit slower, allowing the reader to understand the world just a little bit before being rushed into one of Yalena's biggest insecurities and main motivations.
As a main character, Yalena isn't the most interesting character of the book, but certainly the driving force for all the action that happens. There's two main mysteries - Yalena's parents and ~the sound~. I won't go too much into this as it's kind of a massive plot point (check the spoiler section below if you are interested!) but I will say that clues about both mysteries are dotted throughout the text.
The narrative is a touch heavy handed in places, leaving a fairly obvious trail for the reader to follow, even if the character's don't connect everything up until the end, but the overall mystery is a solid base for the story. I'm not usually one for a school setting (wayyyy to many plotholes/unrealistic moments for me - school takes up a lot of time that books rarely account for) but STAR Academy was definitely something different. It felt like a combination of university and an apprenticeship, where your role is clearly defined but you're still learning how to fit into it. Yalena's journey to leadership is well tracked and I loved her relationship with the Commander. His guidance and belief in her is actually one of my favourite parts of the book and (surprisingly for his fairly small role) he is one of my favourite characters.
As for the action of the book, the bulk of it is in the final third. This is also where I felt most invested in the book. The stakes are raised as the STAR Academy first years are given their mission and the mystery of the sounds origin starts to unravel. I'll talk a little more about this in the spoiler section, but it's when they finally join a team and plan for their mission that I was hooked. There is a new danger, not just "the adults could find out", and I couldn't stop reading once I hit this point.
The ending of the book is a definitely cliffhanger and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series (along with the rest of my readalong group). I'd recommend this book, but with a couple of caveats. Number 1 is that you have to get through the first chapter - it definitely gets better past the first chapter. Number 2 is that sometimes the writing is just a touch stilted. The story got me through these short sections, but every so often the turn of phrase made me screw my nose up a little.
Overall, however, another good sci-fi series and a great book to explore as part of a group! People's theories and speculations kept pushing me to read on and find out which combination of ideas turned out to be closest to the truth!
And this is where the spoilers start, so if you want to read the book stop reading here!
As I mentioned, there are definitely some heavy handed moments. Every clue seemed to stand out, highlighted to the reader even when the characters didn't connect it for themselves. Maybe it's because I'm cottoning on to sci-fi tropes, but I think it was more to do with the length of the book; a longer book would have offered opportunies to be more subtle or draw out the mystery differently.
As soon as one of the professor's mentions two human ships which left Earth in an attempt to find another home for humanity, it's clear that the sound Yalena is trying to decode is going to lead to one of them. It could be unfair of me to say that this is heavy-handedness; afterall, the Farsight and Demonfrost crews are repeatedly brought up throughout the book and are a big thing for the population of Unifier. But. I just wanted to be a bit more surprised by some of it considering the disappearance of these ships were massive mysteries.
The issue of Yalena's parents and space origins popped up at strange times, as if she forgot about it during her studying and then suddenly remembered that her motivation for accepting STAR Academy's invitation was to learn more about where she came from. Despite this, I never forgot it as a reader, meaning her connection to Nova Fia was obvious as soon as they travelled through the wormhole. I'm glad, in fact, that the first book ended with Yalena's decision to keep invesigating the Fians and why they knew who she was because otherwise it would have felt so unfinished and disconnected from the story.
I guess my summary was up above, and that totally stands, but I'll add that I don't actually know where book 2 is going. As much as the mystery of book 1 could be seen from the start, I don't know where Yalena's hunt for her parents will lead her and I can only hope that the other characters get their own story arcs too because I want to know more about them and their backgrounds (yes, I mean Alec specifically. I like him okay).