Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Unearthed - Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner

My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"When Earth intercepts a message from a long-extinct alien race, it seems like the solution the planet has been waiting for. The Undying's advanced technology has the potential to undo environmental damage and turn lives around, and Gaia, their former home planet, is a treasure trove waiting to be uncovered.

For Jules Addison and his fellow scholars, the discovery of an alien culture offers unprecedented opportunity for study... as long as scavengers like Amelia Radcliffe don't loot everything first. Mia and Jules' different reasons for smuggling themselves onto Gaia put them immediately at odds, but after escaping a dangerous confrontation with other scavvers, they form a fragile alliance.

In order to penetrate the Undying temple and reach the tech and information hidden within, the two must decode the ancient race's secrets and survive their traps. But the more they learn about the Undying, the more their presence in the temple seems to be part of a grand design that could spell the end of the human race..."

Now this is how you do a gradual build-up to big reveals! Amelia and Jules end up thrown together on a strange, hostile planet, working together to navigate their way through a dangerous Undying temple to the secrets within. At first glance, the two couldn't have less in common...Amelia is an orphan who makes a living stealing, scavenging, and doing what she has to in order to survive, on the planet to steal enough alien technology to purchase her younger sister's freedom from a seedy nightclub. Jules is an Oxford-educated genius raised around the kind of opulence people like Amelia couldn't even begin to imagine, come to Gaia to study the secrets and knowledge left behind by the mysterious Undying. As they struggle their way across the planet's surface and begin to work their way past the challenges of the Undying temple, though, they begin to discover that they have more in common than first believed...and that they may have gotten themselves involved in something much more dangerous and insidious than they might first have imagined.

This story hooked me right away, and it had me dying to find out what happened next all the way up to the last page. Amelia and Jules are such easy characters to root for, I was on the edge of my seat over every danger they faced. I'm still a little in shock over the ending, and I don't know if I can wait until December for the next book. I guess it's a good thing I've got plenty of reading to keep me occupied while I wait.

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