When these Cosmic Shores novels were first announced, I was really excited by the prospect of some shorter, fast-paced stories set in the Amaranthe universe…not that the rest of the series isn’t fantastic and fast-paced in its own right, but the idea of something new was intriguing.
I was, however, admittedly a little leery of an entire novel with Marlee serving as the protagonist. Full disclosure: I have often struggled with her character (at least the adult version we’ve seen beginning in Riven Worlds). At some point, I concluded that it is simply because she is the antithesis of everything I am, what with her recklessness and constant and overt need to prove herself—she is not someone I would get along with in real life. In that sense, I went into this book somewhat cautiously.
But I was glad to be…if not proven wrong, at least pleasantly surprised. Medusa Falling takes place 3 years after Duality, so Marlee has matured a solid bit since we last saw her. It almost felt like she matured even more just throughout the course of the novel, since she’s separated from literally everything and everyone familiar to both her and the reader (side note: you can still easily enjoy this book without having read the rest of the series). She’s still far from my favorite character in this saga (can’t wait for the next Cosmic Shores installment, omg), but in this book, she still became someone I could root for.
MF is a far more contained story than anything we’ve ever seen in Amaranthe, both in the sense that it focuses on issues involving a single planet AND, with the exception of a trip to an orbital station, all events take place on that single planet. Nonetheless, there is still an incredible sense of scale. Since the rest of the series is this sprawling, galaxy-spanning epic, it’s sometimes hard to remember that all the individual worlds the characters visit have their own histories and politics and problems. The focus has so often been on the Big Bad Aliens™ bent on galactic destruction, not on the sketchy shadow government and secret band of rebels fighting on a single world. The characters and culture of this new world are rich, and still somehow new and fresh and unique even after 19 other books in this series (major kudos there). It was the ability to really delve into the details of those characters and that culture that made the whole story feel so much bigger than it truly was.
The story itself was a ton of fun, assuming you consider conspiracies and rebellions and hostage rescues fun. It’s fast-paced, but not at the expense of character development. You finish the book feeling as though you’ve made new friends, and I hope we’ll see more of the Belascocians in future Amaranthe installments.
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ABOUT G.S. JENNSEN
G. S. Jennsen lives in Montana with her husband and dog. She has written sixteen novels and short story collections, all published by her imprint, Hypernova Publishing. She has become an internationally bestselling author since her first novel, Starshine, was published in March 2014. She has chosen to continue writing under an independent publishing model to ensure the integrity of her series and her ability to execute on the vision she’s had for them since their genesis.
While she has been a lawyer, a software engineer and an editor, she’s found the life of a full-time author preferable by several orders of magnitude.
When she isn’t writing, she’s gaming or working out or getting lost in the mountains that loom large outside the windows in her home. Or she’s dealing with a flooded basement, or standing in a line at Walmart reading the tabloid headlines and wondering who all of those people are. Or sitting on her back porch with a glass of wine, looking up at the stars, trying to figure out what could be up there.
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