🌸 Title: The Infinity Courts
🌸Author: Akemi Dawn Bowman
🌸Release Date: April 6th, 2021
🌸Genre: YA, Fantasy, Fiction, Contemporary, Sci-Fi, Romance
🌸 A non-major spoilers review.
🌸I received an ARC copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
“And in this moment, I’m not a spy or a person without a family. I’m one half of a star, bursting across the sky with the only boy that makes my heart feel like it’s on fire.”
-Akemi Dawn Bowman, The Infinity Courts
The Infinity Courts follows eighteen-year-old Nami Miyamoto as she seemingly is living a good life. She has her best friend turned boyfriend, a loving family, and she just graduated high school. But before she gets the chance to live, she’s murdered. When Nami wakes up, she finds herself in Infinity, the place where human consciousness goes when the physical body dies. An AI named Ophelia that humans used on Earth has taken over the afterlife. Working with rebels, she will have to accept her death and figure out what makes us human when faced with a difficult decision.
Helllooooo everyone! I know I’ve been gone for some time now—life is hard to balance, okay? But I’m back with a review for this wonderful new series The Infinity Courts! I haven’t read anything by Akemi Bowman before, but after reading The Infinity Courts I feel like I need to add everything they’ve written to my TBR. Seriously.
All in all, I really liked it. I don’t even typically like sci-fi, but I devoured it in like 5-6 hours and just couldn’t put it down. Who needs sleep?
Anyways, onto my review for this wonderful new series that I am ALREADY impatiently awaiting book 2 for! *cries*
In The Infinity Court, Nami is murdered. She wakes up in Infinity, a seemingly peaceful afterlife. But what she discovers and has to undertake is anything but peaceful.
Instead of taking the pill or drinking from the fountain, she chooses option number 3: GTFO. She’s rescued by a band of rebel humans who managed to escape the Infinity Courts and are looking for a way to get rid of the Rezzies permanently.
But Nami isn’t sure she wants that.
Nami refuses to believe that things are black and white in this world. She constantly questions the Colony’s decisions and begs the moral implications of right and wrong and if the two species can co-exist, neither side believing they can.
This results in a lot of internal monologue from Nami, and while I wish it didn’t get repeated so many times throughout the story, I understand that the questions are valid and do require a lot of thinking.
We have a band of rebels and a fleshed-out enemy whose motives I could understand.
The band of rebels borders on being cliché, but honestly, it works and I enjoyed it. The book has enough twists at the end to make up for this *cough*.
The enemy, Ophelia and the other “Rezzies”, aren’t just cut and dry enemies. We’re given the reasons for why Ophelia did what she did, and some of the Rezzies even show humanity more than others. They want things such as freedom from the endless cycle of the Infinity Courts. Or at least from a certain one, *wink wink*.
Nami as a character frustrated me—but her intentions were good, and that’s what I enjoyed about her.
Nami seemingly fails at every test that the rebels give her in order to figure out her powers, but she has another ability that most of them don’t have: she can take on the appearance of a Rezzie.
This makes her an excellent spy for the rebels to get more information, and I absolutely loved this. It shows that while Nami may not have the same abilities as everyone else, she’s still useful in her own way and completely unique.
However, Nami would constantly overlook advice given to her and put people in danger because of her actions. It frustrated me, but at the same time, it made me appreciate her character. In order to grow a character has to make choices and deal with the consequences.
Bowman’s writing drew me in from the beginning.
Fast-paced yet thorough, I found Bowman’s writing to be mesmerizing. Even as Nami makes bad decisions, it’s hard not to understand why she makes them. Her character symbolizes what it truly means to be human. I love how we’re shown this all the way from the beginning.
Nami’s courage and selflessness are what kills her in the beginning, but it’s also what makes her achingly human.
The Infinity Courts may have been 500 pages, but it sure didn’t feel like it. I breezed through it and after that ending, I need book 2 PRONTO.
