Review and Ultimate Blog Tour: Shards of Earth or a series that you need to start right now! (Battleships fights to die for! Do you need more???)

Hello people! I hope you all are happy, today I am quite excited because I am taking part in this fabulous blog tour about a book that I loved!

I was really excited when I received my copy, and I was excited when I finally began to read. But I was also a bit scared. On one hand I have read a lot of amazing reviews about this one, and one of my reading goals for 2021 was to read more books by this author so… all is great, yeah? But on the other hand I was a bit scared, because of my expectations and because I have a strange relationship with sci-fi and I usually prefer books that are not heavy on the science part, and this is not exactly easy on that. It is not too much, and it is not so hard, but we have a complex world-building and you feel the sci-fi element really really strong. But then I have started reading it and… wow! So, I would start this review properly, and tell more about it all!

Title: Shards of Earth
Series: The Final Architects Trilogy #1
Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Publisher: Tor
Pages: 592
Publication Date: May 27th, 2021

The war is over. Its heroes forgotten. Until one chance discovery . . .
Idris has neither aged nor slept since they remade him in the war. And one of humanity’s heroes now scrapes by on a freelance salvage vessel, to avoid the attention of greater powers.
After earth was destroyed, mankind created a fighting elite to save their species, enhanced humans such as Idris. In the silence of space they could communicate, mind-to-mind, with the enemy. Then their alien aggressors, the Architects, simply disappeared—and Idris and his kind became obsolete.
Now, fifty years later, Idris and his crew have discovered something strange abandoned in space. It’s clearly the work of the Architects—but are they returning? And if so, why? Hunted by gangsters, cults and governments, Idris and his crew race across the galaxy hunting for answers. For they now possess something of incalculable value, that many would kill to obtain.

This would be a hard review to write, because there is so much to love about this book that it is really hard to make order and write something with sense and coherence. But I would try.
Let’s start with something easy: this book was amazing because it is full of surprising things. And I think that I could leave it at that and be done. Because, really if I have to sum up this book “full of surprising things” would be perfect! This is quite the chunky book, and it has a completely new world-building with science in it, so I thought that it would take me some time to read it. And yet I just flew between its pages. I was there, sometimes comfortably curled up on my couch, sometimes on the edge of my seat, but always there along with the story and the characters, and it took me no time to read it. And this was surprising.
The world-building is quite full of interesting and fascinating things. We get interesting societies out there, races and all that you can imagine, and more. In this respect it remembered me a little of The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. It is not that these two books are similar in much, but in the variety that they offer, all the differences that we can see in their worlds, well yes, I think them similar. Sure, Chambers books are more optimistic and have a sort of “feel good” vibes to it, that this one by Tchaikovsky lack (but I am not saying that we have a grim and pessimistic book, it is just that it is not on the heavy optimistic side).
The Architects are surprising. I was intrigued by them, and they have some big surprises for us in store. But this part of the story/world-building to me was superb.

Sorry, don’t let the new paragraph deceives you, we aren’t done with the surprising part. There are two more points that I want to make here, and they were my absolute favorites in this list of favorite things! Battleships fights! I mean, they are just the coolest ever! Usually I enjoy fights (soldiers/sea ships/battleships/whatever) but I am not a huge fan. I mean, they are there, if I think they are well done I enjoy them but they usually didn’t hook me up, didn’t really engage all of my attention. But here… oh my! I was there, on the edge of my sit, I couldn’t put the book down. I was there, and I was just so hooked up! It was surprising how much these parts were engaging. Really! You have to try for yourself!
And then we have the fact that we get a lot of questions in there, obviously, because it is the first book in a series and it is a whole new world, with complex cultures and characters. So questions are expected. What I wasn’t expecting was to receive so many answers too! And I am not complaining, at all! Especially about the Architects. They kept me wondering for a lot of time, and I was ready to have to wait the next books to know more about them, to find some answers but… I was wrong! And I am quite quite happy to have been wrong!

But with a complex world-building, full of things to discover and all kinds of different people to inhabit it, and with a fast-paced plot, with a lot happening (and some fantastic battleships fights!), we have some amazing characters too.
Idris and Solace have the lion’s share, and they are amazing characters. They both are veterans and they share some pasts, but they are so different. Idris has not aged or slept since the war he “shared” with Solace, he is sullen, he is frail, and he is quite damaged. But, to be honest, everybody is damaged. Idris is a member of a mismatched crew, and this crew has become his family and his safety line.
And the crew is really something. We have the captain, Rollo, who is the glue that keeps them all together (in more than one sense), Olli, who is just so resourceful and full of surprises, Kit, the alien who helps us see all the differences in this world, Kris, the lawyer, who has become one of my favorite characters. And I wasn’t expecting to like so much a space lawyer!
And now we go back to Solace. She is a warrior, and she is part of a bio-engineered race of woman warriors, sort of. And she is the one who shows more growth in there. Talking about “growth” can be a bit misleading, because it is more that we see her slowly showing herself for who she really is, and we can see her adapting to new situations and points of view. So, yes, it is growing, but it is also discovering. And I appreciated it a lot.

There are a lot of things I can say about this book because I loved it. I enjoyed it, I was hooked by it, and it made me think. So I couldn’t ask for more, really. And I really hope you would try this one out, because it is really worth it, and I hope to have at least conveyed how much I liked it!

and half!

Book’s Links:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HLPZY6X
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55437088-shards-of-earth

Have you read this book? Or do you have it on your TBR?? Let me know!!

Happy reading!
S.