I came to this one from a Goodreads recommendation, and I thought it met my criteria for 4.0+ and at least 1k reviews, but now that I look at it there's 6k ratings, but only 33 reviews :( It's mildly entertaining but low quality writing and feels like the kind of sci-fi someone who isn't a sci-fi fan would write.
For an avid sci-fi reader there's nothing interesting here. The aliens are all tired tropes: giant insects, tall grey forms with big dark eyes and no mouth, flying saucers. I'm not sure it would be possible to find a less-novel collection of alien life forms. The aliens all seem to speak English, sigh, with one exception where a captive translator appears but seems to be later discarded for convenience.
The novel is basically a Dan Brown treasure hunt for magical discs, but with much fewer and less interesting puzzles. The author tries to establish a powerful conspiracy with deep control of the government but it feels ridiculous: ZOMG HITLER was looking for these and would have won the war if he found them!!!
Somehow these deep-state-ers are super powerful but fail to control/kill the measly three people who are the only ones that oppose them, despite knowing where they live, and having chips installed in their heads that let them be controlled. The bad guys will make contact in hospital, give them a ride across the country, or seduce them in a hotel room but then just wave goodbye: please continue to work on your quest to undo our evil plan we've been working on for thousands of years...byyeeee! Most incompetent deep-state bad guys ever. The people they are pursuing are constantly going back to their own houses and taking naps, it wouldn't be hard to find them.
EVERYTHING and EVERYONE is beautiful, the most beautiful of all the things ever, honest. There's a real struggle to actually use any descriptive words in the writing. And the chance of aliens matching the human standard of beauty is basically zero, this is just really unimaginative.
...the most beautiful sound that any living thing on this planet had ever heard.
...astonishingly beautiful landscapes
He was the most beautiful being she had ever seen.
...and they walked with an almost heartbreaking level of grace. Lanie had never seen anything or anyone so beautiful.
Minor spoilers ahead.
There's one brief POV for a bad guy, but it contributes very little, and doesn't explain motivations on any deep level, or make the villains any less cardboard. The ridiculously named "Mandi", who is a praying mantis-on-steroids alien, is apparently working to free his people, but with no explanation of why they were captive in the first place. I don't expect answers for everything, but these feel much more like giant backstory world-building failures than interesting-to-be-revealed-in-future vignettes.
Apparently Sar's motivation is to find someone, but there's no explanation for why that requires invading/destroying/torturing an entire planet. If he really wanted that, it seems like it would have been quicker to talk to the three people who would know, probably at the point where he was installing chips in their heads. Or failing that, set up an intelligence operation, not launch an invasion force. The mission to Mars was apparently necessary for Sar to get past some shields, but it's never explained why or how.
All of this questing basically ends in switching on some deus-ex-machina machines that are unexplained. I mean cool, but couldn't the super-advanced aliens that made those machines just have them turn on automatically if a bunch of aliens spaceships show up? Apparently a ton of the populace wakes up with superpowers automatically at the right time, so turning on a handful of machines at the same time should have been easy.
1 star.
