Review: Until the Last of Me

Until the Last of Me by Sylvain Neuvel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was provided an ARC via Netgalley, all opinions are my own.

I really enjoyed this second installment to the series.  This focuses mainly on astronomy and Mia's attempt to find what the Kibsu lost.  In the fist book Mia and her mother were involved in the space program and war efforts in WWII.  In this book Mia is traumatized by the loss of her mother and is doing everything she can to protect her own daughter, Lola from the Trackers.  Mia does what she can to nudge the space program in the right direction, but she and Lola stay out of the limelight and instead are trying to find the knowledge their ancestors lost.  Much like the first book the blend of history and science is done extremely well!  We learn quite a bit about the planets as Voyager 1 & 2 roam the cosmos and we learn about archeology as Mia and Lola search for a long lost artefact and decipher a forgotten language.

We also get insight from the Tracker side, Samael is one of the trackers, whose family has been hunting the Kibsu for generations.  He is not like his father or brothers.  He has compassion and plans out his actions.  I believe this is a trilogy and I'm looking forward to see how the rest of his story plays out if there is another book.  Overall I enjoyed this and I'm looing forward to reading more from the author.  I really enjoy how much time and effort he puts into researching his books and the amount of information he gives readers in a digestible way.

As with the last book I highly recommend reading the "Further Reading" section as it again gives insight into the research the author did to write the book.  It gives context to the scientific and historical context of the book and what he chose to change and why or what events he kept and why.  I love learning about the things that inspired an author during the creation of a book.  You can tell alot of time went into the research to write this book.  There are some really interesting facts in this section, I found it worth the read!  It also sounds like there may be a third book in the series.  

My only real issue was this was sometimes hard to follow.  This switches perspectives somewhat abruptly, and in the ARC the chapters don't indicate who is telling the story.  It isn't not always obvious for several paragraphs to figure out who the I is in the chapter.  Sometimes it is talking about Mia and Lola, while other chapters are about Samael and his brothers.  It isn't always obvious who the chapter is about.  There are chapter headings about when the chapter takes place.  This books comes out soon so perhaps in the final version there will be a label of who the chapter is about.   The Entr'actes are all about historical figures so those are easy to understand who they are about.  

Neuvel has a very unique writing style that will appeal to every reader's taste.  I actually like it, but again it will be a personal preference.  The writing switches from standard paragraph format to a dialogue format that almost looks like text messaging.  If you like books told in epistolary format or mixed media, you likely won't mind.  If you don't like a more mixed media format, it is something to consider.

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