sunsetxcocktail

Review: Invictus

I received a copy from Netgalley.

I snagged this one as a read it now title. I'd heard a lot of buzz on this book and to be honest it didn't really interest me having seen a lot of Firefly comparisons and I've never seen an episode or been interested in the show. But then I saw it as a read it now and I've enjoyed the authors work before so figured why not give it a try?

I tried. It was certainly creative, an interesting take on time travel agencies. The hero of the novel is an anomaly who was born outside of time - his mom was a famous pilot and on a job when it happened - and the hero has gained a somewhat infamous notoriety. He’s charming, witty and snarky though appears to have an attitude with authority. Nothing particularly new there where YA heroes are concerned (at least not to me anyway). Dude has done his training and is ready to take his final exams so he can become an official part of the space and time program that run the show.

Left with little options he finds himself taking a risky job of basically going through time and retrieving select objects requested by the boss for huge sums of payment. He gets to pick his own crew and name his ship. Each crew consists of the captain, the historian, the doctor and the math guy. Bonus points for diverse characters. The only really memorable character for me was Imogen the historian who changed her hair colour every day.

During a mission a new comer hijacks the object the the crew are after sending the mission into a tailspin. And causing of course, all sorts of other problems. Something to do with parallel words comes up half way through and at this point I sort of lost interest and started skimming. The technical side and sciencey side of things were a little bit too much for me and I got rather bored.

I found the plot getting rather silly by the end as well and rolling my eyes a lot. Though one interesting thing about it was it was a standalone which is really rare inYA sci-fi. Everything concluded though it was left with a possibility that it could continue. Some times sci-fi with time travel works for me, sometimes not.

Unfortunately I just didn't like this one much at all.

Thank you to Netgalley and Little Brown Books for Young Readers for the chance to view the title.