 Hello Seekers of Knowledge, I am Kim, and this is a spoiler-free review of Nixia by Scott. Oh, I have to look. Rankin? Convenient. His website is itspronounced rankin.com. It's very helpful, thank you! This book is published by Crown Books for Young Readers and is coming to you September 2017. Trigger warnings for this book. There's vomiting. It is not graphic, but it is frequent. There's loss of violence and there is character death. So if you have a tendency to get attached to people, maybe don't read this book. It's supposed to be heartbreaking and I personally enjoy having my heart broken, but if that's not your cup of tea, I understand. Okay, let me see if I can summarize this. There's a lot going on in this book, and I guarantee that anything I summarize here will not be the extent of it. Just forewarning, yeah. Okay, here we go. The Bapal Corporation has accepted 10 candidates onto Genesis 11, a sci-fi year spaceship that has ever sci-fied before. Genesis 11 will take a year-long journey to a habitable planet called Eden in order to mine a new form of matter called Nixia. The 10 candidates must compete for their places because only eight will be making the final drop. The catch? All candidates need to be under 18. The native life forms of Eden appropriately called Adamites abhor adults and honor children. I hate words and also English. But there are things Babelcorp doesn't want anyone thinking too hard about. One of them is this. Nixia is a lot more than it seems. Our protagonist Emmett, a young black man from Detroit, has to fight through a year of grueling tests in order to earn his place on Eden. This book had a lot of great quotes, but I picked this one. Babel might have all the keys, but they don't know what they're keeping in the cage. I like the way this book is written because the narration changes as our protagonist changes. It's first-person. It starts with this very colloquial American slang, um, office and dap kind of stuff. And so essentially everybody's forced into a very academic style of English because, first of all, they're learning a lot. And second of all, only a few people actually speak English. Um, the way they do it with this book is people wear a mask made out of Nixia, which was invented by Babelcorp, and will translate any language that you speak into the language that a person who is also wearing the mask can understand and hear it, and vice versa, which I think is just really cool. So that's the middle, is this very academic form of English, so he's left behind a lot of his slang. And then towards the end, it's even discussed, the ten candidates begin to build their own slang that is appropriate for their current surroundings, which is a spaceship. So it's incredibly appropriate, and I just really love that attention to linguistic detail. Like, well done! Well done! The other element about that that I really find very interesting is that since not everyone is hearing English, that means that instead of one English dialect that was created on this spaceship, in fact, you have ten dialects in ten different languages. I mean, I don't know how to say fathom in Mandarin Chinese, but the Nixia mask does, and therefore this technology has helped to integrate people and create new language in every language. I love this! Linguistic Nerd Fest concluded, I promise. Emmett is a conscious young man. He notices things, but he does not dwell on them. He just saves them for later. Nonetheless, he's very instinctual and action-based. And throughout the book, he is the recipient of some seriously awesome parenting. I am so happy about the quality of parenting that this young man is receiving, because so often our classic male protagonist in sci-fi has parents that are dead, parents that are absent, or if they're present, they're abusive. All this to elevate the dark, brooding, emotionally constipated, toxically masculine is toxically a word? Hey, Siri, define toxically. Siri says it is a word. Thanks, Siri. My pleasure. As always. I like The Dark Knight as much as the next girl, but we can all agree that wandering around with that much man pain is just unhealthy, not to mention annoying. Emmett's dad has some wonderful words of wisdom to help his son keep his head on straight during this year-long crucible. He's encouraged to look at the whole picture to remember that the difference between right and wrong is not always clear, that people make mistakes, that the only thing that you can control is yourself, and that no one is perfect. Throughout the book, Emmett struggles with his anger. He has recurring dreams about black holes, and sometimes in his mind refers to himself as the destroyer. But he uses a tool his grandmother taught him, filing away the causes of his anger in little filing cabinets in his mind. A for asshole, I for injustice. And his self-control makes him powerful. He also makes friends with his sweet-mate Kaya. She's a Japanese strategist of the First Order, and she has this insatiable need to know what's going on behind the curtain of Babelcourt. She declares the very first day that she cannot come home to more competition, and she makes an alliance with Emmett. They are open with each other, their rooms are safe zone, and they become family. And I'm over here on the sidelines, crying about how male protagonists have emotional life and can get sad and angry and happy sometimes. Ugh. Okay, moving on. Characters! This book is incredibly diverse. Like, so diverse. I cannot even... I don't think a word exists for how diverse this is. Emmett, young black male protag, Kaya from Japan, Bilal from Palestine, the West Bank. He is just too nice. He's just too nice. Katsu, the big Japanese guy with the smart mouth. Long Wei, a Chinese dude who is outrageously smart and is seriously a douchebag. There's Jazzy, or Jasmine, a blonde pageant girl from Memphis with a cool head under pressure. Azima from Kenya, she is fiercely independent and indomitable with spear. Jamie, our only white guy who is from Switzerland, is a Dora, a Brazilian girl, and her boyfriend, Rothe, both of them play their cards very close to the chest. And that's just the competitors! There's also Defoe, one of the CEOs of Babelcourt. He's an older black man with a withered arm. And yes, that one kind of smacks of disability coding as villainy, so I guess point against. And then Kaya and Emmett's assistant slash psychologist named Vandermere, who's Dutch. As for the plot, there's not really much that I can say that I haven't already said, but you should know. Defoe's rather twisty. He runs the tests and just know that whenever Emmett starts to get comfortable, the rules are about to change. Overall, I give this book 4.5 out of 5 stars. It is a great beginning to a trilogy. If you're fans of Ender's Game or The Hunger Games, you will probably love this book as much as I did. If you are looking for an own voices, sci-fi, coming of age adventure, with some shadowy corporation action and a dash of really, just really excellent parenting, try this book. It comes out in September of 2017 and apparently it's available for pre-order now. I fully expect each and every one of you that reads this book in September to tell me what you think, because there are some serious spoilers. I just, I'm discovering that this is actually a downside of reading arcs. Like, okay, yeah, you get to you get to read the book first, but there's no one to talk to about it and it gives me feels. Okay, feels aside though, let me know what you think. I just, that's all I'll say now. Moving past it. You know, I'm gonna make my roommate read this book. She still has to get through thickest thieves, which I'm also, by the way, forcing her to read. When she does, then, then I'll make her read this book and then I'll have someone to talk to about it. My plan is genius. Alright, I will see you next time around. Bye.