Book Review: The Spiral Arm (episode 1, season 1) by Peter Boland

The Spiral Arm by Peter Boland
Review Copy: Purchased
Purchase: Amazon

Description From Goodreads: 
This is the first novella-length episode in the series.

Wren Harper lives on an overcrowded Earth on the brink of apocalypse. There are just too many people. The answer lies 600 light-years away on Kepler; a planet more than double the size of Earth. For decades humans have been fighting another race for its control. Earth’s armies are depleted, so now 15-year-old cadets are sent to fight, trained along the way in vast combat ships. But why has Wren been chosen? She's small and geeky and not a fighter. Will she survive Kepler? Or will the training kill her first?

My Review:
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve had The Spiral Arm on my Kindle for some time now, but only now got around to reading it. I’m a huge fan of novellas, mainly because I tend not to have a lot of free time these days, so the fact that this was a novella series with multiple installments already available? I was excited to finally dive into the story, and I’m happy to say it did not disappoint.

Unfortunately, as much as I would have loved to give this five stars, the ending seemed like an odd place to end the first installment, which took my rating down to four. However, outside of that? I really didn’t have any issues with this novella. It was fantastic.

Dystopian stories as of late have all been rather similar, but The Spiral Arm manages to standout. It’s such a unique concept, with excellent world building and characters, that it’s hard not to be pulled in almost instantly. The best part of this first installment? It didn’t waste time setting up a love triangle. Being a novella, it’s not always easy to tell a contained story in such a short amount of pages while also trying to set up for future installments, but that wasn’t a problem here. The author took enough time to properly develop these characters in this first episode.
I’m very excited to pick-up the rest of the series and dive into this world that Boland has created.


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