I've been trying to get into more science fiction this year, and after watching the show adaption of this series with my boyfriend, decided to pick this up. I really enjoyed it. This is my first space opera (not including the poem Aniara, which I don't think I understood enough to count), so definitely take that into consideration with this review.

I really enjoyed this. It was an interesting story with a great cast of characters that had me going for all nearly 600 pages. Reading this didn't necessarily feel groundbreaking in any way, but it was so much fun and such a well crafted story.

I wasn't the biggest fan of the short chapters. Each chapter alternates POV between James Holden, XO of a water freighter, and Joseph Miller, a cop on Ceres. They tend to average somewhere around 15 pages and I just found the constant flipping back and forth a little frustrating. It wasn't anything terrible, just a minor annoyance.

Also, the authors tried to end nearly every chapter on a dramatic note. I understand that writing technique and it can work, but it was a little over the top when there were so many chapters and so many things happening. It felt forced and trying too hard. Again, not terrible, just another minor annoyance.

After around the halfway point, it started getting a little tedious to read. I think part of it was because I don't enjoy reading action sequences. They bore me. So that's just something that's not too my tastes. And also since I've seen the show, I knew pretty exactly what was going to happen and I think that made it a little worse. I had to push myself to keep reading. In general I'm very glad I watched the show first because I think it helped me visualize a lot of the sci-fi elements I'm not familiar with, but the show is very close to the same story.

I really enjoyed the way gravity played a part in the story. There were big changes, like the physical bodies of the people who'd grown up on the Asteroid Belt, creating almost a new species (doesn't feel like the right word, but I don't know how else to phrase it) of human, but there were small things too. It changed the way they behaved in action scenes. It changed the way medicine was dealt with. It just seemed really well thought out.

I also loved the characters and their relationships. I think a few of them were a bit more minor than I originally expected (coming from the show where there was a bit more characterization in the rest of the cast), but the main characters were so well done. At the beginning I was concerned they're be flat archetypes. Holden was the righteous captain who always does the right thing, and Miller is the jaded, cynical cop. They fit exactly into those cliches, but there's so much depth to them that it doesn't matter. It's such a good example of how you can use cliches well. I will admit I'm not entirely sold on the romance yet, but I'll wait until the next book to make a call on that.

I don't know if I'll be in this series for the long haul. Having watched all three seasons of the show and then reading the first book, it gives me kind of an idea of the trajectory of the series, and I don't know if it will be to my tastes. Book two is a definite and three is a probability, but beyond that, I'm unsure. I'm more interested in the politics aspects of the story which were more prominent in the show, and I'm not sure how much they will feature in the series beyond book two. But maybe I will be surprised.

All in all, I really enjoyed this experience. It's definitely outside my comfort zone, but in a fun way. I'd definitely recommend this series. I thought it was incredibly interesting and well done. Really looking forward to the second book which I'll hopefully pick up this month.