Book Review: Honor Among Thieves by Ann Aguirre & Rachel Caine

I feel the stars

There was a lot of noise around this book just before its release, which made me curious about it and it didn’t fall flat for once. I liked it but it wasn’t my favourite of the year just yet.

Book Review: Honor Among Thieves by Ann Aguirre & Rachel Caine

Rating:


Title & Author: Honor Among Thieves by Ann Aguirre & Rachel Caine
Genre: Science-Fiction, Adventure
Release Date: February 13 2018
Series: The Honors
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books

Synopsis

Petty criminal Zara Cole has a painful past that’s made her stronger than most, which is why she chose life in New Detroit instead of moving with her family to Mars. In her eyes, living inside a dome isn’t much better than a prison cell.

Still, when Zara commits a crime that has her running scared, jail might be exactly where she’s headed. Instead Zara is recruited into the Honors, an elite team of humans selected by the Leviathan—a race of sentient alien ships—to explore the outer reaches of the universe as their passengers.

Zara seizes the chance to flee Earth’s dangers, but when she meets Nadim, the alien ship she’s assigned, Zara starts to feel at home for the first time. But nothing could have prepared her for the dark, ominous truths that lurk behind the alluring glitter of starlight.

I give Honor Among Thieves by Ann Aguirre and Rachel Caine four out of five hearts because I thought the story itself was great. There were just small things here and there that I really didn’t like about it.

Zara Cole is a great character, with all her activities you notices her background and her thoughts behind them. I loved that about her. But at the start of the novel she literally tells the reader she wants to go to a weird kind of prison, a certain one even (I still have no idea why that one exactly). Because she has taken something from some kind of mafia.

This is one of the points I didn’t like, the book hits the ground running. It tries pull the reading into the middle of a hard situation and in the mean time introduce a character and some people she knows. But then it lacks a lot of information because they want to keep the pace going. If Rachel and Ann had introduced Zara during whatever happened why she needed to run, they might have had more time to show who Zara is instead of having the reader only really getting to know her if they stick around long enough. I did and in the end I did like her as a character, but for most of it I didn’t care because I didn’t understand Zara’s thoughts.

The Leviathan is an ancient alien race, but there is not much more information on them than that they are space ships which are structured like beings (with organs and all) and they have personality. I thought they sounded great as an idea, but could have gotten a bit more background information on them. They are super interesting, but I felt it kept me hungering for more info on them and some times a bit too convenient in their lack of rules. Like being able to make a thing the characters need just because the story demands it and there are no rules (of which the reader knows) that prevent that from happening and otherwise they couldn’t do something similar in another case.

I do think Ann’s and Rachel’s descriptions are great, they really know how to pull the reader into their giant space adventure. I just wished they had started out the novel differently because it was very hard for me not to give in while I didn’t care for Zara. At some point I even cared more about Zara’s space mate, Beatriz.

I hope that in the following books there will be more information about the alien tech implanted in Zara’s head because I thought that was a nice twist, although it was a bit convenient too.

Overall Honor Among Thieves is a great novel, if you can see passed the small flaws in this novel. For me they bothered me a little bit too much, but it still didn’t kill the novel for me.

Let me know what you thought of this book!
If you have any requests for which book I should talk about next, please let me know in the comments down below.

For now, let books enrich your life!

Goodreads
Ann Aguirre
Rachel Caine

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