Salvation

June 15, 2020
After Containment (2019), Kenzie and her fellow survivors are stranded on a strange planet. Through Kenzie's borrowing of Liam's teleportation power, she and her friends (plus the remaining Legion bounty hunters) find themselves on a desert planet. The abandoned city they find could easily be mistaken for a post-apocalyptic Earth--right down to the English writing. Rune theorizes about co-evolution and some sort of invisible link between races. Soon, tensions between the characters must be set aside as they face suspicious, increasingly desperate locals, who are running out of supplies. Despite major reservations about the trustworthiness of their chief contact among the locals, Kenzie, in particular, argues for trusting them and working together. After all, the same aliens attacking Earth in the previous books have long been in this world, giving them a deadly common enemy. Moreover, stopping the creatures here would help prevent the imminent invasion of Earth. How well plot twists land depends on how much suspension of disbelief readers are willing to give for some questionable character reasoning--some will find there isn't a plausible enough story foundation to support the twists and big revelations. Those invested in the characters, though, will enjoy the exploratory breather offered in the first act and the high stakes of the second. Most characters are assumed white aside from Taiwanese twins Cage and Rune and hijabi Imani. A conclusion on par with the rest of the trilogy. (Science fiction. 12-18)

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