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Lyra Daniels, who after being nearly killed took a new name to make her super-wormer enemy think she stayed dead, is still working as a junior security officer on the planet Yulin. Ara, as she’s now known, learned a mind-blowing fact at the end of book 2 in the Sentinels of the Galaxy series, Chasing the Shadows, and is trying to come to grips with it (or the alternate possibility, that her brain has sustained some damage). She was a talented wormer in the Q-net, but now the Q-net has chosen her to protect the galaxy, and she can do a whole lot more than she could before — or than anyone else can. And she’ll need every bit of help she can get to protect her family, her fellow security team members, the people living on the base on Yulin, and, well, the whole Milky Way galaxy. No biggie.
So she has a lot of work to do. But as this book starts, Ara’s biggest obstacle is her parents: They are worried she’s sustained brain damage and needs to rest (read: stay out of the Q-net) and she should let other people (read: adults) do their jobs to protect Yulin and the galaxy. She’s forced to undergo medical and psychological evaluations and go back to doing schoolwork and social time and is confined to her parents’ quarters. Ara’s just counting down the days until she turns 18, but she’s afraid they don’t have that much time before Jarren destroys the base and uses the Warriors and the portals they guard to basically take over the galaxy.
This series’ premise fascinated me: Earth’s Chinese terracotta Warrior statues have been found on dozens of distant planets, and scientists have been studying them to learn why they were put there, and by whom. Those answers have been provided a bit at a time throughout the series, and everything came together in this conclusion. There’s a teen love story here, which in this book is particularly thin and is quite frankly not too deep throughout the series, but it plays second fiddle anyway to the interesting premise. The writing, or at least the point of view of the teen protagonist, often seems sophomoric, and that doesn’t have to be the case when writing from the point of view of an adolescent. So while those things bothered me a bit, I still enjoyed the series overall because of the plot and premise. Entertaining and intriguing.
Rated: Moderate. Profanity includes one instance of strong language, fewer than 10 instances of moderate language, and 25 or 30 uses of mild language. Sexual content includes very brief references to kissing/making out. There is one scene at the end where the two main characters shower together. Violence includes shooting with pulse guns that knock people out and some shooting with deadly weapons, some hand-to-hand combat, and other peril. It’s less than the second book.
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