Reactor: As with her debut novel, the immersive and compelling Star Eater, Kerstin Hall chucks you straight into Asunder and asks you to keep up. She is a master of consistent, sometimes subtle worldbuilding; anything she needs you to understand, Karys sees, or interacts with, or has cause to explain or have explained to her, succinctly and elegantly.
This story sits just under the skin, a tangle of questions about faith and shame and what a person does with the power they have—or that is given to them. It is, immersively and emotionally, about survival: how a person survives, what they do to survive, what they endure while surviving, and where the choices they make in order to survive wind up taking them. I can’t shake Karys and her choices out of my head, and frankly, I don’t want to.
This world deserves more story, and more time, and more readers, and I hope it gets all three.