I won a copy of Lindsay Ellis‘ Axiom’s End through Goodreads last year. I only just now got around to reading it.

Truth is a human right.

It’s fall 2007. A well-timed leak has revealed that the US government might have engaged in first contact. Cora Sabino is doing everything she can to avoid the whole mess, since the force driving the controversy is her whistleblower father. Even though Cora hasn’t spoken to him in years, his celebrity has caught the attention of the press, the Internet, the paparazzi, and the government—and with him in hiding, that attention is on her. She neither knows nor cares whether her father’s leaks are a hoax, and wants nothing to do with him—until she learns just how deeply entrenched her family is in the cover-up, and that an extraterrestrial presence has been on Earth for decades.

Realizing the extent to which both she and the public have been lied to, she sets out to gather as much information as she can, and finds that the best way for her to uncover the truth is not as a whistleblower, but as an intermediary. The alien presence has been completely uncommunicative until she convinces one of them that she can act as their interpreter, becoming the first and only human vessel of communication. Their otherworldly connection will change everything she thought she knew about being human—and could unleash a force more sinister than she ever imagined.

I always find it interesting when I read a book, love it, and then read other reviewers’ critical reviews of the same book. I just read one that discussed the romance of the book. And while I’ll always defend the stance that every reader’s encounter with a book is valid, I didn’t read romance into this story. Mutual affection by the end, sure, even a relationship of a kind, but a platonic one built on circumstances. I wouldn’t call anything in this book romantic, or it a romance in and of itself.

In fact, that’s part of what I most liked about the book. Ellis didn’t take the low-hanging fruit of tossing in some romance. The aliens are ALIEN. The circumstances are bleak. People are shit, sometimes even ‘people’ of multiple species. It made for an interesting mélange.

I appreciated that some questions are left unanswered, leaving the reader to make their own assessment. I also liked Cora quite a bit, though I’ll acknowledge that she tended to just go with the government flow a little more easily than I’d have liked. The book is quite long and a bit slow in the beginning, but the writing is readable and eventually the pages flew by for me. I quite enjoyed this and will be looking for more.