Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Sci-fi, Space Opera
Content: Strong Language


I read this book three years ago and I thought I would share my review of it on my blog since I'm about to read the second book in the series in December and I've recommended the TV series to quite a few friends.

Jim Holden is XO of an ice miner making runs from the rings of Saturn to the mining stations of the Belt. When he and his crew stumble upon a derelict ship, the Scopuli, they find themselves in possession of a secret they never wanted. A secret that someone is willing to kill for - and kill on a scale unfathomable to Jim and his crew. War is brewing in the system unless he can find out who left the ship and why.

Detective Miller is looking for a girl. One girl in a system of billions, but her parents have money and money talks. When the trail leads him to the Scopuli and rebel sympathizer Holden, he realizes that this girl may be the key to everything.

Leviathan Wakes is a mix of space opera and Noir which brought to mind Voice of the Whirlwind by Walter Jon Williams, and those hard-boiled detective type books as well. The prologue drew me in immediately, I was really interested in Julie and how she was going to get out of the situation she was in. Unfortunately we don't find that out for a huge chunk of the book. We are introduced to Holden and Miller in the first chapter of the book and they both came up a bit short for me. Holden and Miller were both the polar opposite of each other. I really had a hard time liking either of them or caring what happened to them for a while. The book was so much better when they finally met and teamed up.

Miller was very cynical, but smart and observant. But his being in love with a woman he doesn't even know was ridiculous. Love may not be the right word. More like obsessed. He becomes obsessed with solving the case of the missing Julie Mao and in turn obsessed with her. I guess we can blame it on the fact that he is a really messed up drunk. He was really hard to like in the beginning, but by the end I was crying for him.

Holden was the naive idealist who has good intentions, but messes everything up because he sees everything too black and white. Honestly I really hate when the "good" guy is characterized this way. Holden does eventually learn a few things and becomes less annoying and more likable later in the book.

A couple of other small complaints I have about the book would be: Do I really care or need to know what is happening to their certain body parts when they hit a certain amount of Gs? No...no I don't. And I don't care about the fact that they have catheters stuck in them in the med bay either. Too many references to body parts. It just seemed a bit juvenile for the writers to keep going there. Also there is a big revelation that Miller has near the end of the book that I feel should have happened long before it did, I figured out early on in the book what was happening to those people who got infected. For Miller to be characterized as someone so smart and observant about people, he really wasn't too smart and observant there.

With those negatives out of the way I will say that I thought the story was good and there are a lot of layers to peel back in upcoming books. Overall I liked the book. It didn't blow me away, but it wasn't bad either.

 
Update 12/23/15: I've been watching the TV adaptation of this on Syfy and after seeing the first three episodes I am really liking it. I'm finding the TV show more compelling than I found the book.

Update 2/6/16: After finishing the first season of the TV adaptation, this story has just continued to grow on me. I was so pleasantly surprised by the first season of this. It's easily one of the best TV shows on Syfy in a very long time, just leaps and bounds above the other space opera shows they've offered in recent history. It's an odd thing when I think a TV show is better than the book it was based on, but that is the case here. I do feel like I was probably too hard on this book in my initial review, maybe because it wasn't exactly what I was expecting, but I am seeing it through different eyes now. The show has taken these characters that I wasn't all that crazy about and added more depth to them and this in turn has renewed my interest in reading the rest of the books in the series, especially since I've heard the characters deepen and become better in subsequent books.



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