While browsing Storytel, my audiobook subsciption, I found they had Zenith! I was pleasantely surprised as I hadn’t expected they would have new English releases. Turns out they do! Almost all of the 2018 books I read so far have been audiobooks haha. A ton of people have said things about Zenith, mostly because Sasha is a super populair Booktuber. I decided to check the book out for myself and will tell you all about it today!Cover

I like this cover, I would say it’s a pretty standard science fiction cover but I love the colours on it and this would definitely urge me to pick the book up if I came across it in a store.

Plot

Zenith is the first book in the Androma Saga and is mostly about our main character Androma, aka the Bloody Baroness aka Andi. Andi and her all-girls-crew of space criminals are flying all over the galaxy in their spaceship Marauder (love that reference btw <3). After a routine job they crew gets in a lot of trouble when some people from Andi’s past show up. And that’s where our story takes off.

I really enjoyed this space opera. It’s told from different points of view, all with their own narrator in the audiobook. I love it when we get multiple POV’s in books like this. At first I wasn’t sure how all of them were connected and it was fun slowly getting more pieces of the puzzle. I think it was about half way through the book when we get all the information to see the complete picture. Because I listened to the audiobook it was quite easy to distinguish the different POV’s, and while I can’t speak for the written book I do feel like you can tell pretty easily who’s POV you’re reading.

There were some interesting twists in this story and I didn’t see all of them coming! I love it when authors can surprise you like that. The story has a whole wasn’t super unique and if you read it a lot of Science Fiction I understand why you might find it less enjoyable. However, for someone who’s like me, enjoying YA science fiction a lot at the moment, this is definitely a book you will like. And let me tell you, that ending will leave you flabbergasted and craving more!

Characters

I loved the Marauders crew a lot! Our main character is Andi, she’s the captain of the ship and very good with her blades. You get to know more of her backstory through flashbacks and that really helps you understand her motives and why she is the way she is. I enjoyed reading about her and her relationship with the other girls. While I liked her backstory with Dex, I wasn’t a fan of her current story with Dex haha.

“But Andi had decided, long ago, that the nightmares were her punishment. She was the Bloody Baroness, after all.”

I think Dex was the only character I didn’t enjoy, I got so annoyed reading about him. When we first meet him, he’s quite unlikable and made some comments about his and Andi’s separation that I think he later contradicted. He was trying to be snarky all the time but it just felt off. I felt like Lindsay and Sasha were trying a bit too hard to create a typical hero that we would all fall in love with but for all I care he could go ahead and just float himself.

Lira is Andi’s second-in-command and contrary to most YA novels we actually do get a well developed back story for her! I thought the backstories were very well done and I enjoyed reading them a lot. We also get to meet Lira’s twin brother, another enjoyable character. The last two girls on Andi’s crew, Breck and Gilly  were interesting characters I would love to read more about. I hope we get more of a story for them in the sequel!

While I really disliked Dex, I adored Valen! His backstory was quite interesting and I loved how his story came together with the rest of our heros. I can not wait to read the rest of his story and where he’ll be going from here. Nor was super interesting to read about as well! I loved realizing how she was connect and once again, I’m excited to read the rest of her story. Klaren was our last POV and while she didn’t seem connect to any of it at first I really enjoyed that last piece of the puzzle. She knew what she wanted and she would go for it no matter the cost. I would have loved to have her chapters be longer and get even more of her backstory.

Worldbuilding

I was so happy a map was included in this one. Since I read the audiobook I didn’t had access to it at first but Candyce owns the paperback so I snapped a picture when I was at her place haha. It was definitely convenient to look up where our characters were in this universe every now and then.

We got to explore different kinds of worlds in this galaxy and they were all so different. You could tell the authors really thought about these different worlds and gave them all different cultures and different people. I would like to read more about the worlds and life on there and hope we’ll get just that in the rest of the series.

“And Andi’s crew, a group of girls hailing from every hellish corner of the galaxy, were as sharp as Andi’s blades.”

All in all a very enjoyable YA science fiction book I would definitely recommend. I know I’ll be reading the second book when it comes out!