Aestus: The City by S.Z. Attwell has been on my TBR for quite a while thanks to the shouting about it by some indie reviewers I like to follow. I’m glad I was able to read this for SPSFC and I’m excited to say that the author is also working on a guest post for my SPSFC Finalist series. I’m really looking forward to reading it and hope you all will check that out as well once it’s ready. Check out below what I thought about this book!
Aestus: The City
Author: S.Z. Attwell
Pub day: August 06, 2020
Length: 706 Pages
Available for purchase here.
Blurb
An underground city, built centuries ago to ride out the devastating heat. A society under attack. And a young solar engineer whose skills may be the key to saving her city…if she doesn’t get herself killed first.
When Jossey was ten, the creatures of the aboveground took her brother and left her for dead, with horrible scars. Now, years later, she’s a successful solar engineer, working to keep her underground city’s power running, but she’s never really recovered. After she saves dozens of people during a second attack, she is offered a top-secret assignment as a field Engineer with Patrol, but fear prevents her from taking it…until Patrol finds bones near where her brother disappeared.
She signs on and finds herself catapulted into a world that is far more dangerous, and requires far more of her, than she ever imagined. The creatures and the burning heat aboveground are not the only threats facing the City, and what she learns during her assignment could cost her her life: one of the greatest threats to the City may in fact lie within. With thousands of lives at stake, can she act in time?
Review
Aestus: The City is a book that has been on my radar for quite a while. I have heard really good things about it and was really happy that SPSFC forced it to the top of my TBR. As so many people know, even highly anticipated books sometimes don’t get read for quite a while because there are just so many of them! Thankfully this issue was circumvented smoothly this time!
I don’t think there is any other way to start this review than by mentioning the incredibly well done sense of dread present in the first couple of chapters. I was so anxious while reading them. I don’t think there have been many books that had me feeling this strongly right from the start. There were also a couple of interesting mysteries and reveals relatively soon in the first half of the book already that made me feel invested pretty quickly.
Aestus is told in multiple POVs. The beginning had one main narrator that I much preferred over the others as those felt just a little more clunky. Later on, we got to spend more and more time with other characters as well and they smoothed out more as time went by. I do think that some reveals later on in the book would’ve had a little more impact if the feelings and thinking of some of these other characters had been explored more deeply along the way. I wasn’t quite invested enough in one of them for those to hit as much as they should’ve.
Despite the expansion of the POVs, I preferred the female MC’s narration throughout the entire book. Her feelings and motivations were explored the deepest and she had the most exciting and interesting adventures as well. Some of the happenings (I don’t want to spoil what exactly) that the other POVs were involved in felt a little repetitive and boring at times, though eventually those had some exciting turns as well.
The way the dangerous creatures were referred to by different people and factions throughout the book felt a little inconsistent. I can’t go into too much detail here for spoiler reasons but this stood out to me a little. I also felt like the story could maybe have been a bit shorter overall.
I really appreciated that this book didn’t rely on romance directly. It was set up in a way that could’ve easily been overshadowed by a love story been aside from some hints here and there, it was not a focus of the book. While I do enjoy a good romance, I don’t think this first book in this series (I’m not sure how this part continues later on) would’ve been served well if that had been different. There was definitely a focus on different types of relationships between people and how those affected the major plot points of the book but I’m glad those happened the way they did without a lot of pining after each other and other things that happen when romance is a major part of a story.
While I did have a couple of gripes with this book here and there, overall Aestus was one of my favorite reading experiences of the competition. I really enjoyed the way the author really made me feel the different emotions of the characters. If I didn’t have SPFBO books to work on next, I would finish this duology right away. I do hope to read the second book very soon though.
The Shaggy Shepherd 