The gang’s back, y’all.
I had a lot of fun with the smaller, more contained stories in the Cosmic Shores novels, but reading this book felt like being reunited with a bunch of old friends. I hadn’t realized how much I missed the full Amaranthe cast after spending the last three books with (mostly) individual members, especially given some of the bombs we got dropped on us toward the end of the Riven Worlds arc.
If you’re reading this review, chances are you’re a veteran reader of this series and have already read them, but while they’re technically standalone stories, I would highly recommend checking out those Cosmic Shores books before diving into Liminal Space. Each CS novel ties into this new Amaranthe arc to varying degrees, but The Universe Within in particular introduces some pretty heavy implications regarding the big final boss of this saga: the universe-killing, manifold-eating, seemingly unstoppable Dzhvar.
This is one of those stories where you just know the heroes are going to win in the end, but everything’s looking pretty bleak at this point and you can’t for the life of you figure out how that victory is going to come about. Half the characters in this book are wrestling with personal insecurities of some kind as they struggle to figure out how to stop the destruction of the universe (I mean, who can blame them?). The other half are wrestling with the dire secrets they’ve been forced to keep. Meanwhile, Mesme and the Kats are being cryptic as ever (if you know, you know).
While Alex, Caleb, Nika, Miriam, and Corradeo deal with the Dzhvar’s inevitable arrival in a more direct sense, characters like Eren, Nyx (aka My Faves™), Richard, and Marlee are still having adventures of their own…because it never fails in this series that even when there’s a big baddie threatening the entirety of civilization, someone somewhere still feels compelled to cause problems on a smaller scale that need to be dealt with. That someone is a familiar face this time around, and despite being an incredibly unpleasant person, that conflict makes for a fun side story…a side story that is almost certainly not over yet.
In pretty much every review I’ve written for this series, I’ve commented on how massive its scope is, and that feels especially true now that we’re closing in on the end of the saga. The final two books are going to be the culmination of every single thing that has happened since Starshine (and even before), and I can’t wait to see how it all works out.
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ABOUT G.S. JENNSEN
G. S. Jennsen lives somewhere in the U.S., in a locale that may or may not be where she lived the last time she published a book (she’s a gypsy at heart), with her husband and one or more dogs. She has become an internationally bestselling author since her first novel, Starshine, was published in 2014. She has chosen to continue writing under an independent publishing model to ensure the integrity of her stories and her ability to execute on the vision she has for their telling.
While she has been a lawyer, a software engineer and an editor, she’s found the life of a full-time author preferable by several orders of magnitude. When she isn’t writing, she’s gaming or working out or getting lost in the mountains that loom large outside the windows in her home. Or she’s dealing with a flooded basement, or standing in a line at Walmart and wondering who all these people are (because she’s probably new in town). Or sitting on her back porch with a glass of wine, looking up at the stars, trying to figure out what could be up there.
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