The Stark Divide is a book in parts. The first part is a sci-fi thriller, with three crew members on a spaceship trying to survive as a catastrophic event occurs. The second part revisits characters from the first part as they experience life on a planet-sized living generational ship. The third part sets up events for the rest of the series as refugees from Earth arrive and the situation gets complicated.

This is a good science fiction story. There are nods to the work of Kim Stanley Robinson and Larry Niven. There's an interesting piece of world-building. There's a diverse group of characters. The book doesn't necessarily break new ground, but the storytelling is good and it's nice to see queer representation in a sci-fi book.

All-in-all an enjoyable book. I look forward to reading the rest.

This book was pretty entertaining. I had highish expectations going into it because of previous reviews I had read and I really enjoyed this book. Some elements were not my favorite I did not like how all the characters were written. However the story was gripping and I found myself wanting to go along for the ride. I will be continuing to read this series and I love the updated cover.

setting: 5/5
characters: 3/5
plot: 4/5
writing style: 4.5/5

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for letting me review the arc copy!

I loved the world-building, it was very intriguing and pulled me right in however, there was too much going on with all the different perspectives that my small brain could not keep up with and didn't let me connect with the characters as much as I wanted too but the plot itself was great!

I would like to thank Netgalley and the publisher for an arc of this book, but would also like to say to anyone skimming through reviews about the plot itself to skip my comment!

Very unfortunately I have to leave this one as DNF for a specific reason that has more to do with me as a reader than the book itself. The plot is intriguing and I'd love to read it till the end to see what's going on (just the fact that she spaceship is a living organism ... chefs kiss, yes, thank you). Ultimately, my issue was the style - the chapters are very short and, at least up to the point where I let this book go, split into 3-4 different POVs. I have a bad attention span and this was just too much for me to focus on - I already have trouble keeping track of events when a book has more than two POVs but each of them gets a full chapter, so this quickly turned from itriguing to extremely frustrating.

Maybe someday I'll manage to read the full book, but as things are now, I simply don't make a fair reader to judge the contents of it themselves. I really hope that readers who don't mind books in this style will find it enjoyable!

The worldbuilding is superb, absolutely first rate concepts and notions, and I'm always a sucker for living ships. It was a swift read, and therein lay my biggest issue, I felt there was far more to the world than what I'd seen, and decades long jumps between the different parts of the book gave me the feeling that while there was more, it was either being held for another books, or it was things that we'd never see.

In truth, I didn't really get into the characters, and with the gap, it felt like we were skipping large portions of each characters arc in the haste to get to the new ones, and the ships, while sentient, don't have the same resonance.

I note that it's book one of the Liminal Divide, so I'll be looking at the others to see if I can pick up all the bits I missed in this one.