Have you ever read a book that had such a big, shocking plot
twist that you had to put the book down for a moment to process it? In
Illuminae, this is practically every second page. The number of times that I
stopped reading to think over what had just happened was pretty much
uncountable. I bought Illuminae as a Christmas gift for myself, and believe me
when I say it’s the gift that’s kept on giving; I haven’t been able to stop
thinking about it since I finished it. And I know it’s really early, but I’m
gonna make the call: this will be my favourite book of 2016.
There’s two things that I’m going to talk about in this
review: the first is the story itself, and the second is how the story is
presented, because it’s unlike any book I’ve picked up before, and both these
aspects had an equal role in immersing me in this book.
But first, the story. Illuminae begins on a small planet
called Kerenza, which is used for illegal mining. The planet is attacked and
invaded by a mega-cooperation, BeiTech, leaving thousands dead. Kady and Ezra, our
heroes, are among the residents of the planet who are forced to flee. They
fight their way onto separate evacuating spaceships, with an enemy BeiTech ship
close on their tails, but this is the least of their worries, as a deadly
plague has broken out on their ships, and the AI, AIDAN, who is programmed to
assist the crew, is not all it seems to be. Kady hacks into the ship’s database
to find out what’s going on, and soon realises that the only person who can
help her save the spaceships is her much derided ex-boyfriend Ezra. Oh dear,
this can’t be good - or can it be? I can’t say much more about this without
giving away important plot details, so instead, I’m going to move onto the way
the story’s laid out.
The book itself is presented as a file of documents (also
known as a dirt file), which when read in chronological order, retells the
story of the destruction of Kerenza and the unfolding relationship between Kady
and Ezra. The fascinating thing about this book is that it’s told entirely
through email correspondence between characters, online messaging, recordings, and
interviews of the two main characters. The pages themselves all look like they’re
separate documents and files, some of which give the appearance of being
edited, with some words struck through, and some redacted. Even the AI
documents are formatted in that they’re completely black, and that the typed
words were white, and generally were not written in an ordinary book format, as
they occasionally spiralled across the pages or formed pictures. This kept me
drawn from page to page as I went from the facts of the story to the characters’
emotions to the AI’s ramblings. This formatted storytelling is unlike any other
book I’ve read, and I found this really appealing, in fact, I found everything
about the book appealing. This book played my emotions like a fiddle, somehow
incorporating humour even into the most heartbreaking moments.
The two authors, Amie
Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, who both live in Melbourne, have done a brilliant job
of putting together a clever, humorous book that managed to keep me on the edge
of my seat the whole way through. For me, this is a five star book and I can’t
wait to get my hands on the second one in the trilogy.
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