#42 in Young adult
Illuminae
- 608
- Pages
- about 11 h
- Reading time
- Aurealis Award
- Inky Awards
- Australian Book Industry Awards
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Our view
“Illuminae” tells its space opera through files, emails and transcripts, and the device carries the story rather than decorating it. The pressure rarely eases across more than six hundred pages, though some readers feel dropped into the opening with little background and some find the central teenage romance the weakest strand. Squeamish readers should know it has contagion and bloody deaths.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Illuminae is a 2015 young adult space opera epistolary novel written by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. This is the first novel of the three-book series The Illuminae Files. The story is told through a series of documents; including classified reports, censored emails, camera transcriptions, and interviews, all of which were curated for a court case against the main antagonist company, BeiTech. Illuminae is set in 2575 and is the collective story of teenage colonist Kady Grant and her boyfriend Ezra Mason, as they become refugees after becoming caught in a political crossfire.
Reading order · The Illuminae Files
Full order & progress →- IlluminaeThis book
8.38.3 / 10 - Gemina
8.48.4 / 10 - ObsidioObsidio–Not ranked yet
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.4 across 516 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 78% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Young adult average of 7.8. That is how 8.3 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.4 | 18 | 4% |
| Hardcover | 8.4 | 498 | 97% |
Frequently asked
What age is Illuminae for?
Illuminae sits on the Young adult shelf in the sources we use, which by convention means roughly ages 13 and up. This is a guide from the book’s category, not a publisher’s age rating. It has 608 pages — longer than 81% of the ranked books in Young adult.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Young adult — with scores between 8.2 and 8.4, closest to this book.
