A review by theladysparks
The Brightness Between Us by Eliot Schrefer

5.0

 

Seventeen years after the crash of the Coordinated Endeavor on an exoplanet, Ambrose Cusk and Kodiak Celius raise two teens, Owl and Yarrow, in a perilous frontier. Their family bond is strong until they face an internal threat. Meanwhile, thirty thousand years earlier, Ambrose learns his mission to save his sister was a deception by his mother, who planned to send clones to ensure humanity's survival. As he discovers another spacefarer in a similar predicament, he must decide whether to traverse a war-torn world to reach him. Separated by time and space, their intertwined fates hold the potential to save them and humanity.

"What an awful and brief and magnificent experience."

I want to start off by saying that I cannot thank Eliot Schrefer enough for reaching out and offering up a physical ARC of The Brightness Between Us. It's one of my newest most prized possessions and being able to annotate my copy made this entire book all the more magical.

If you haven't already read The Darkness Outside Us, this is your sign to go and do so right now. Like stop everything that you're doing and go pick up the first book because it's one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I have ever read and The Brightness Between Us carries on that torch. I know that a lot of people were skeptical about this sequel but I'm here to tell you that it is beautifully done and brings even more depth to the story of Ambrose & Kodiak while also introducing us to new characters that you are going to fall in love with.

This book not only has four points of view but also has dual timelines that all flow together in a beautiful way to tell a story that is so perfectly interwoven. While the clone versions of Ambrose & Kodiak are in the book, they aren't the POVs that were getting and initially I thought that it would bother me but it makes so much sense and is so beautiful once you get into it. Instead we are given the point of view of two of their "children", Owl & Yarrow - each going through and experiencing their own struggles of growing up and being human. We also get to travel back into the past and see the events that pan out on Earth with the real Ambrose & Kodiak following the departure of the Coordinated Endeavor and that particular storyline filled me with so many different feelings and makes me think of fate and how despite the differences of time and circumstances, they're still interictally tied together.

There were a lot of aspects of this book that I loved and found to be moving but to highlight a specific thing that still sticks with me I want to talk about the way that the human experience is written about in this book. It is so beautiful and painful and real that it brought me to tears on multiple occasions. I think it's brilliant when futuristic settings talk about the magnitude of how it feels to be a human being in the infinite space of all creation and how in the grand scheme of things, it's easy to feel insignificant and small. And this book shows how four very different people deal with really big things, you get to see their happiness and their sadness, you get to see them through their anger and their sorrow, and I just think it was so beautifully done.

If you are a fan of the sci-fi genre, regardless of whether or not you usually read YA or not, I cannot recommend picking up these books enough.