The Brightness Between Us - The Library of the Uncommons

English language

Published Oct. 1, 2024 by HarperCollins Publishers.

ISBN:: 978-0-06-334376-4
Goodreads:: 199532064

(1 review)

In this sequel to The Darkness Outside Us, a Stonewall Honor Book, New York Times bestselling author Eliot Schrefer delivers another ambitious, genre-bending novel and epic love story that spans thousands of years and the far reaches of the galaxy.

Seventeen years have gone by since the Coordinated Endeavor crashed on a distant exoplanet. Ambrose Cusk and Kodiak Celius are now the devoted parents of two teenage children, Owl and Yarrow, in a hardscrabble frontier home. Though life on Minerva is full of danger, the family’s bond is enough to make it all worth it—until they learn that the biggest threat to their survival might come from within.

More than thirty thousand years in the past, Ambrose wakes on Earth to find that his mission to save his sister was a ruse. His mother betrayed him, and the truth of her plan—to send twenty clones of him to continue human …

In this sequel to The Darkness Outside Us, a Stonewall Honor Book, New York Times bestselling author Eliot Schrefer delivers another ambitious, genre-bending novel and epic love story that spans thousands of years and the far reaches of the galaxy.

Seventeen years have gone by since the Coordinated Endeavor crashed on a distant exoplanet. Ambrose Cusk and Kodiak Celius are now the devoted parents of two teenage children, Owl and Yarrow, in a hardscrabble frontier home. Though life on Minerva is full of danger, the family’s bond is enough to make it all worth it—until they learn that the biggest threat to their survival might come from within.

More than thirty thousand years in the past, Ambrose wakes on Earth to find that his mission to save his sister was a ruse. His mother betrayed him, and the truth of her plan—to send twenty clones of him to continue human civilization thousands of light-years away—sets Ambrose spiraling. When he discovers that another spacefarer is suffering his same fate, he will have to decide whether to risk crossing a world at war to reach him.

Separated by time and space, a young family and two strangers learn that their lives are intimately intertwined. They race to uncover the unexpected connections that might save them all . . . and perhaps humanity as well.

2 editions

Alex Cabe reviewed The Brightness Between Us by Eliot Schrefer (The Darkness Outside Us, #2)

Conflicted Between Looking Back and Looking Forward

3 stars

The biggest challenge here was to come up with a new threat or mystery, and the sequel mostly succeeds, although I wish it spent more time on Minerva and less explaining the first book. I did think it was an interesting choice to have the surviving characters from the last book never be the point of view characters in this one.

I liked the Owl chapters best, followed by Ambrose. The Kodiak chapters were a bit of a chore and Yarrow didn't have a lot of personality.

This wasn't more sexually explicit than the first one, but it felt less "YA" in a way that's hard to define. One of my points on the first book was that writing it as YA felt unmotivated, and this one course-corrected a bit.

The Devon Mujaba stuff was kind of silly. It felt like kind of a bad "Hey, I recognize that" instinct …

The biggest challenge here was to come up with a new threat or mystery, and the sequel mostly succeeds, although I wish it spent more time on Minerva and less explaining the first book. I did think it was an interesting choice to have the surviving characters from the last book never be the point of view characters in this one.

I liked the Owl chapters best, followed by Ambrose. The Kodiak chapters were a bit of a chore and Yarrow didn't have a lot of personality.

This wasn't more sexually explicit than the first one, but it felt less "YA" in a way that's hard to define. One of my points on the first book was that writing it as YA felt unmotivated, and this one course-corrected a bit.

The Devon Mujaba stuff was kind of silly. It felt like kind of a bad "Hey, I recognize that" instinct when you write a sequel or prequel.

Schrefer somehow understands war and guns less than he did in the first book. I get that the warbot's place in the story is to be an implacable threat, but he didn't give it the specs or description to fit its juggernaut reputation.