Moving to a space station at the edge of the galaxy was always going to be the death of Hanna’s social life. Nobody said it might actually get her killed.

The sci-fi saga that began with the breakout bestseller Illuminaecontinues on board the Jump Station Heimdall, where two new characters will confront the next wave of the BeiTech assault.

Hanna is the station captain’s pampered daughter; Nik the reluctant member of a notorious crime family. But while the pair are struggling with the realities of life aboard the galaxy’s most boring space station, little do they know that Kady Grant and the Hypatia are headed right toward Heimdall, carrying news of the Kerenza invasion.

When an elite BeiTech strike team invades the station, Hanna and Nik are thrown together to defend their home. But alien predators are picking off the station residents one by one, and a malfunction in the station’s wormhole means the space-time continuum might be ripped in two before dinner. Soon Hanna and Nik aren’t just fighting for their own survival; the fate of everyone on the Hypatia—and possibly the known universe—is in their hands.

But relax. They’ve totally got this. They hope.

In the second book of Kaufman’s science-fiction saga called The Illuminae Files, a story about the conflict between two megacorporations continues. Only, this time, the plot is set on a Heimdall carrier, where the remaining survivors from Kerenza are headed. Nik is a seventeen year old mafia member, who has already served three years in prison. His family, or should we call them The House of Knives, is into drug industry on Heimdall – they get their drugs from gross wormlike creatures called laminae, and Nik distributed those products. Hanna is station captain’s daughter and everyone’s favorite rich girl. Nik deals her drugs for parties and her boyfriend Jackson has to cover her absence from her dad more often than he would like to.

When 24 terrorists from BeiTech take over Heimdall and kill Hanna’s father, she has to show them she is much more than daddy’s little girl. Nik and Hanna are the only ones not trapped by the terrorists and, with the help of Nik’s cousin Ella – a kickass hacker forced to spend all her time in one room – have a chance of fighting back and freeing Heimdall from BeiTech’s hold. But they don’t know that another BeiTech’s spaceship is on the way to destroy Hypatia before it reaches Heimdall, and Cerberus and his men have no intentions of keeping Heimdall residents alive.

Uh, so as I said in my review for Illuminae, this book sounds waaay better in previews than it actually is. While I had mixed feelings about Illuminae and the way it was composed and written, Gemina was disappointment in its purest form. From the plot that I didn’t actually care about, to characters that are shallow and underdeveloped, and in the end – a plot twist in the middle of fucking nowhere that no one actually wanted or needed.

So, what am I talking about?
First of all, it seems to me that authors wanted to created something they simply could not with the way they started to write this book, and that is a good novel. In a jumble of files, chats and emails, the only way to give readers an actual insight in characters behavior and story are camera footages. Chats and all are cool and fun, but when it comes to characterization or some real action on the ship, the only thing that comes close to illustrating those scenes are “narrated camera footages”. Well let me tell you how those footages look – exactly like any chapter in any novel commonly written. So when in first book, those chapters that included footages weren’t used to often and appeared only when necessary, in Gemina EVERY OTHER CHAPTER was, in fact, a camera footage. So instead of calling this a collection of hacked files, let’s just call it camera footages with some chats every now and then, because that is what this actually is.

Then comes the problem of plot. Kill me, but it feels so recycled. Okay, someone wants to take the ship over, but giant worms that make carnage on the ship sound pretty similar to the phobos afflicted from Alexander. And that shit with wormholes and getting people miraculously alive was just too much. Don’t get me wrong, I love time travel, I love science-fiction and universal theories, (*spoiler*) but I. hate. Badly done parallel universes and “resurrections”. The plot had its moments and it was eventful, but I just didn’t care about it (I don’t think I know what happened for the last 50 pages).

Which all brings us back to characters, which were good and I so badly wanted to like them, but how can I like characters from whisperNET chats and camera footages that someone narrated. Nik sounds like a cinnamon roll and misunderstood cutie, Hanna is a badass fighter with military knowledge and I even liked Ella – but that’s kinda all they are, just shadows of characters that could be, if this has been done properly…

Most of you will disagree with this review and my opinions of everything because I seem to be the only one who doesn’t love these books xd I’ll try finishing Obsidio later this week in hope it gets better because Illuminae wasn’t so bad.