I Read This: The Osiris Project by E.J. Swift
I would like to thank Night Shade Books for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book for them.
Adelaide “Mystik” Rechnov is a spoiled brat socialite searching for her missing (and presumed dead) mentally-ill twin brother Axel. Vikram “Bai” is a passionate but impoverished citizen of Western Osiris fighting for the basic human rights of his Western kinsmen. Their paths intersect when Adelaide’s brother Linus suggests to Vikram that his sister might just be bored enough to help him win over the City Council - lead by their father. As Adelaide fights to find out what has happened to her twin brother and Vikram fights to keep his people from starving through another winter; tensions (and passions) run hot as they both help and hinder each other in this opening book of the Osiris Project series.
This book was a bit like a pan of brownies that have been left in the oven just a little too long. Crispy and questionable around the edges, but still pretty good once you get into the middle. Character development was excellent and the reader really gets a solid feel for the emotions that Adelaide and Vikram are feeling – Adelaide’s anguish over the loss of her twin and frustration with the clandestine behavior of the rest of her family, Vikram’s tenacity and heartache when he describes the people in the West who needlessly starve or freeze to death on a nightly basis and guilt about becoming a little more “Citizen” that he had intended to, and of course the complex emotions that they feel towards one another.
My only real complaint was that the settings/scenes were not nearly as transparent as the characters were. More than once I found myself reading along swimmingly thinking Adelaide was in a tower or an office, only to read another paragraph and find out that somehow she had moved into a tunnel or onto a street. That split second of confusion and subsequent regrouping of my mental focus really messed with my immersion at times. Osiris is such a different city that anything in our “real world” that leaving nearly everything to context clues really bothered me. Other than that, I found this to be a pretty easy read and decently compelling story that I would recommend to anyone who likes light Sci-Fi with characters who are easy to champion. I definitely plan on reading the next book in the series.