Reviews and Comments

The problem with writing a review for the Last Gifts of the Universe has been where to start. Thus, I’ve spent the weeks since finishing it just telling everyone “you have to read this book! It’s so good!” Alas, while true, that’s not a very in-depth review.

One of the most gorgeous bits of this book to me was something that wasn’t immediately obvious to me, but the way it developed was so organic and just simply right for the story. This is a story narrated by Scout, who I hope you’ll fall in love with just as much as I did, but it’s not really Scout’s story, not entirely. Scout’s story is twined around Blyreena’s story as they uncover the message left by Blyreena—the last message she’d ever send out into the universe for someone to hear. It’s the story of Blyreena and her partner and their love, about all the things she learned from life and from her partner’s gentle generosity.

But it’s also about Scout, about their drive to find the information necessary to keep the coming destruction at bay. It’s about Scout’s grief and their coming to terms with it, and about their relationship with their brother and their anger at the corporate goons.

Each bit of Blyreena’s message that Scout listens to unfolds her story a little more and drives Scout’s story as it unfolds as well, like a flower within a flower both blooming in sync. Because I want to avoid spoilers, I can’t say too much more about it, except that this is a story about life and love and loss. It’s a story about relationships and meaning, dressed up in redemption.

Oh wait my other favorite bit is Pumpkin!!! Space cats need to be a thing from now on. Pumpkin’s utter cat-ness and his personality leap off the page just as much as Scout, Blyreena, and the rest. It’s poignant and optimistic, filled with heart. It made me laugh and it nearly made me cry—something I don’t often do with books. It’s one of the rare books I may end up re-reading, so I’m gad I have my very own copy for that reason.

If you want a light sci-fi packed with heart and musings on life with comic relief provided by His Royal Pumpkin-ness, this stand-alone story is absolutely something to check out. It’s an incredible debut by an author I’ll be watching for more to come from, for sure!

I read this book slowly because I wanted to make it last. It is another incredible work of storytelling. Caiden is an excellent character, even though there were definitely moments I wanted to shake him. I absolutely loved his found family, and mourned his losses with him. Seriously, the speed at which the author made me love some of these characters was astounding.

Essa does a brilliant job of drawing the reader into Caiden’s world and then rapidly expanding it as his understanding expands, so the reader gets to feel Caiden’s awe and disorientation (without it being overwhelming). The aliens are really alien and so cool, and yet at the core they’re just people, as it should be. Shades of grey are everywhere throughout this book, and Caiden wrestles with morality as much as he wrestles with his (justified) anger. Every secondary character felt fully realized and fleshed out, and they stepped right off the page with their own traumas and their own goals, and I loved them. Well, except one. He can still rot, even if he feels like a whole person. Even many of the tertiary, background characters felt fully realized, despite seeing them for a short time, and I love the way they add a layer of history to the crew.

The universe felt vast and the factions felt real, with good people crossing paths with Caiden along with really-not-nice-at-all people. But even the antagonists are fleshed out and multi-dimensional, with factions within factions (sometimes within factions!), and I loved the peeks into the wider politics of the universe. And what a universe it is—vast and multi-layered, with universe bubbles touching universe bubbles, each with varying physics and other conditions, and that was just so cool. The tech was super cool, too, and the gloss leads to some Spice-like economic-political shenanigans.

In addition to all this, Essa manages to wrestle big questions with thoughtfulness and I really appreciated that. Caiden’s quest for revenge and how much he risks for it, the questions of how responsible he is for things that happen that he can’t prevent, and the way he slowly learns to look beyond monsters to see if the heart of the monster is really a monster or not. Just masterfully done, I thought. A ton of action is packed into this book, yet it begins and ends rather slowly and thoughtfully, counter-pointing the gripping, hectic pace of some of the chapters in the middle.

So in short, if you enjoy sci-fi with alien aliens, multi-layered societies, three dimensional characters, emotional intensity, and questions of morality, you need to read this book.

And then we can all want our own pet nopheks together.

For those interested, the main character is ace-spectrum, and there's fantastic trans, nonbinary, and #OwnVoices neurodivergent representation in this book too. (En is the best supporting friend ever.)