Title: Goddess in the Machine
Author: Lora Beth Johnson
Series: Goddess in the Machine
Page count: 400 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars
When Andra wakes up, she’s drowning.
Not only that, but she’s in a hot, dirty cave, it’s the year 3102, and everyone keeps calling her Goddess. When Andra went into a cryonic sleep for a trip across the galaxy, she expected to wake up in a hundred years, not a thousand. Worst of all, the rest of the colonists—including her family and friends—are dead. They died centuries ago, and for some reason, their descendants think Andra’s a deity. She knows she’s nothing special, but she’ll play along if it means she can figure out why she was left in stasis and how to get back to Earth.
Zhade, the exiled bastard prince of Eerensed, has other plans. Four years ago, the sleeping Goddess’s glass coffin disappeared from the palace, and Zhade devoted himself to finding it. Now he’s hoping the Goddess will be the key to taking his rightful place on the throne—if he can get her to play her part, that is. Because if his people realize she doesn’t actually have the power to save their dying planet, they’ll kill her.
With a vicious monarch on the throne and a city tearing apart at the seams, Zhade and Andra might never be able to unlock the mystery of her fate, let alone find a way to unseat the king, especially since Zhade hasn’t exactly been forthcoming with Andra. And a thousand years from home, is there any way of knowing that Earth is better than the planet she’s woken to?
Goodreads blurb
I have sort of a love/hate relationship with this book. It has great world-building and did a good job of emphasizing how language changes and evolves over time, even though it does get confusing at times. I was oblivious to some of the plot twists, but some were still pretty predictable (not that that’s a bad thing). It played a lot into the idea of people seeing technology/science that they don’t understand as magic or sorcery, which indicates there was some sort of devolving or apocalyptic event that happened between Andra being put in cryostasis and her waking up.
Magic’s just science we don’t understand yet.”
Arthur C. Clarke
The characters fell a little flat for me. Andra is likeable enough, but both Zhade and Maret annoyed me more then anything else. Maybe it’s because I’m not a huge fan of the “brothers pitted against each other” trope. Also, I can see Maret turning into a Rhys-like character and idk how I feel about that. None of the characters had much growth throughout the book, minus Andra discovering a few things about herself. I can understand/excuse that as this is only the first book though.
All in all, I just felt sort of meh about this book. I liked it enough to be excited for the sequel, but that’s mainly because I want to see where the story goes and I like the world it’s set in. This is also a debut novel for the author, so I’m interested in seeing how the writing will evolve over the span of the series.
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