*Huge thanks to ‘Macmillan-Tor/Forge ’ and ‘Netgalley’ for providing me with an ebook for Review*

This is the second book in Sylvain Neuvel’s ‘Take them to the Stars trilogy’. It continues with the multigenerational cast and incorporates real-world historical events to tell a unique story.
If you have read any of Sylvain Neuvel’s previous books, you will know that he has a unique writing style. This really works for me. I also think audio versions add much to the presentation of his books.

I loved the first entry in this series ‘A History of What Comes Next‘ and reread it in preparation for this book, is this better? Maybe. I say maybe as it's different to the first one in that the aims of the characters are less about the space race and more about finding an artefact. Even a character in the book references Indiana jones. I enjoyed this shift of focus for the two parties in the book and it allowed for the country hoping that I enjoyed in the first book.

This book included much more from the Trackers and I liked the inclusion of more characters whilst keeping the cast small enough to handle. I enjoy a well-defined villainous character and here we get many.
The book’s structure is the same with interludes that add depth to the backstory by rewriting events from history. I love this element of the series. Setting this series against the real-world space race makes these books fascinating and you can tell the author spends much time researching for these books.
As with all enjoyable books, this one was over too quickly, however, you also have the bonus content that explains all the history and how the author used them to tell his story. There are also many references for further reading.

I’m excited for book 3 but in the meantime, I will revisit this book when the audiobook narration is available. I’m hoping that due to the multigenerational aspect of the series, the previous narrators are used.

I was very interested in this series, so it was definitely my mistake requesting an arc of this one without reading the first. While I did manage to finish the predecessor of this book by listening to the audiobook, it wasn’t necessarily a favorite. And reading this was much more difficult because I was confused or bored most of the time. I’ll probably not say more because I’m sure this series is for those readers who will love this kind of slow paced and very expansive, well researched sci-fi.

*Huge thanks to ‘Macmillan-Tor/Forge ’ and ‘Netgalley’ for providing me with an ebook for Review*

This is the second book in Sylvain Neuvel’s ‘Take them to the Stars trilogy’. It continues with the multigenerational cast and incorporates real-world historical events to tell a unique story.
If you have read any of Sylvain Neuvel’s previous books, you will know that he has a unique writing style. This really works for me. I also think audio versions add much to the presentation of his books.

I loved the first entry in this series ‘A History of What Comes Next‘ and reread it in preparation for this book, is this better? Maybe. I say maybe as it's different to the first one in that the aims of the characters are less about the space race and more about finding an artefact. Even a character in the book references Indiana jones. I enjoyed this shift of focus for the two parties in the book and it allowed for the country hoping that I enjoyed in the first book.

This book included much more from the Trackers and I liked the inclusion of more characters whilst keeping the cast small enough to handle. I enjoy a well-defined villainous character and here we get many.
The book’s structure is the same with interludes that add depth to the backstory by rewriting events from history. I love this element of the series. Setting this series against the real-world space race makes these books fascinating and you can tell the author spends much time researching for these books.
As with all enjoyable books, this one was over too quickly, however, you also have the bonus content that explains all the history and how the author used them to tell his story. There are also many references for further reading.

I’m excited for book 3 but in the meantime, I will revisit this book when the audiobook narration is available. I’m hoping that due to the multigenerational aspect of the series, the previous narrators are used.

My review can be found on Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/26094184-cadguycad

Holy moly I'm not even sure where to begin with this! This sequel was not like the first book in so many ways, but managed to capture so much in only so many pages. I thought a lot about what generational trauma and grief might mean to these women and how through it all they were pursuing a directive that they not only were biologically programmed for, but with the weight of knowing that the end goal was for the good of all humanity. No pressure, right? But it has been fun seeing the last 3 generations of Kibsu grapple with what it means to both fight against these things and sacrifice pieces of themselves to help further their aims.

Seeing these women make calculations and study complex math and science to bring humanity closer to the stars is such a neat take on the space race, and watching them never take credit for it underpins the real life quiet achievements and the accomplishments of the women who were not always given the recognition they deserved, but helped lay the foundation for so much of what we know about the universe and space travel.

I also really appreciate that Sylvain Neuvel took so many real life places, times and pieces of history and inserted the Kibsu in these moments. I think it makes the story feel much more grounded in reality, and provides an interesting touchstone to what may be hidden in plain sight throughout time and space.

I would have liked to love the ending more, and I can't say that I agree with how some of those final decisions were made, but I'm just glad there's going to be another book because zoo wee mama I don't think I would be okay if this was how the series ended.

Huuuuuge thank you to NetGalley and Tordotcom for the ebook ARC of this! I was looking forward to this book so much, and I'm happy to have gotten a chance to read it a little early.

I was excited for this continuation of the story of the Kibsu and the space race, but this second installment in the Take Them to the Stars series fell short for me. Maybe I would have liked it better if I had opted for the audio version of the book, like I did for A History of What Comes Next since the different narrators made it easier to follow which character was speaking. But each chapter was written in a different character's perspective and sometimes changed from first to third person, with no indication of who was speaking in the beginning of the chapter and I had to do a guessing game on who's perspective I was reading. It made the book very hard for me to follow and get into.
I also didn't enjoy the story as much as I did in the first novel. In the first book, Mia is growing up and coming into herself and spends a lot of time doing science and questioning the history of the kibsu. I enjoyed the historical and scientific aspects. In this book, it seemed a bit disconnected and the plot didn't really have a definitive direction. I found myself wondering what the point was. I still appreciate the research and the dedication to the technical details of history Neuvel includes, but I just found that I wasn't as excited to continue reading this one as I was the first book.

Until the Last of Me is an ambitious second installment to a Sci-Fi duology that is pitched as something for fans of the first contact with aliens trope, but is mostly just a love letter to astronomy. Ambitious, I think, is the kindest way to say something sets out to achieve a goal that never quite meets the mark. And as much as I respect the project of this (not to mention the research that went into it), I have to say this whole series felt a little off kilter when it eventually hit the target.

It’s odd that despite being the concluding novel in this duology - the grand finale, if you will - the scope of this second installment feels somehow much smaller. I think that’s somewhat to do with less chronological time spent with the two Kibsu, when we witnessed Mia growing up and into her role as a woman and figurehead in her family in the first novel. Without getting into spoiler territory, Mia spends much more off this book being a harried mother of a teenager and doing little science. And while A History of What Comes Next was by no means a perfect read for me, it didn’t leave me with the same niggling sense of “So… what was the point?” that this concluding novel did.

Sylvain Neuvel has a very unique writing style, and it’s a stylistic choice that I think works much better in books like The Test. I read the first in this duology on audio first, and recall getting confused by who was the speaker during long stretches of dialogue without any kind of qualifiers indicating who was actually speaking. I thought reading this book instead of listening to it would resolve some of this vagueness but if anything it was even more distracting without a narrator to at least try and distinguish these voices. To make things more convoluted the author seems to indiscriminately switch between first and third person POV between chapters with minimal means to immediately distinguish that characters themselves. I often would begin reading a chapter with “I” and not have any idea if I was sitting with Mia, her daughter Lola, or the antagonist of the story. Who even now I couldn’t tell you the name of.

I will say there was clearly a lot of love and time spent on the technical details of the world here, which was especially evident in the author’s notes highlighting all the men and women that expanded humanity's knowledge of the cosmos in our actual timeline. Neuvel made the facts and figures there digestible in a way he wasn’t able to in the actual narrative of his novel. It even left me wishing he would branch out into writing non-fiction focused on science instead of this flavor of science-fiction as his next project. I don't think fans who absolutely loved the first book in this series will be disappointed by the direction this book took, but those who were on the fence to begin with are likely to feel similarly lukewarm. For me personally, Until The Last of Me was a muddled conclusion to a series that had an incredibly unique concept but took it down a meandering path that never allowed for the potential here to fully manifest.

Thank you to the publisher Macmillan-Tor/Forge for providing an e-ARC via NetGally for an honest review.

Big thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me the opportunity to read and review this title.

Sylvain Neuvel is such an amazingly creative author and I just love this series. It helps that I was a space-obsessed child and am still fascinated by the discoveries we continue to make and the efforts we continue to make to explore this vast universe.

Neuvel has really tapped into that fascination. A History of What Comes Next took a look at what it would take for humans to actually leave this planet. Until the Last of Me focuses on the Voyager missions and how humans gained the ability to send unmanned space vehicles into interstellar space. The next logical step seems to be how to we attach ourselves to these vehicles.

I would be lying if I said that I am extremely fascinated by the Voyagers spacecrafts and may have shed a tear in 2012 when we finally reached interstellar space and the amazing fact that in a mere 300 years we will have reached the furthest boundary of our solar system.

Thank you again Netgalley, I cannot wait for the 3rd book.

Huh. I did find this book intriguing, and there was enough to make me read through to the end, but the style was very disjointed, I didn't identify with the characters as much as I did with those in the first book in the trilogy, and overall I was just hoping for more.
I appreciate the opportunity to read it in advance of its release. Thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley.

This is an odd one.

There are so many narrators that with no clear delineation I had quite a bit of trouble figuring out who's perspective I was reading at that time.

The stories, the speech was all presented in such a detached way I had a really hard time connecting with the story or the characters. I just didn't care what happened with the plot or the people.

I fall more and more in love with Sylvain Neuvel's writing with every book he releases. A History of What Comes Next took me by surprise when I read it, because I was not at all prepared for Neuvel to rewrite human history and turn the world upside down...Now he's done it yet again.

The pulse pounding world hopping decade spanning adventure continues in book 2. Until the Last of Me continues to follow Mia, her daughter, and her ancestors into a new age as Mia must learn how to survive on her own for the first time.

This series is a strange hodgepodge of an Indiana Jones and The Americans for me. This story takes you across the globe, through time & generations, and eventually to the stars. The devastating cycle of birth and death, mother and daughter is gut-wrenching and as inevitable as humankind's constant trudge towards progress.

Until the Last of Me features a lot less espionage then book one, and alot more treasure hunting, ancient artifacts, and secret tombs. More time doing research in the library. But Neuvel has spent just as much time and energy into making that research worthwhile as he did having Mia blowing up Nazis and shooting rockets into space. His writing style is so special and unique it sucks me in every time and immerses me in the mind's of these characters and the constant state of doubt & uncertainty that comes with being a stranger in a strange land and never really knowing why.

I read this book pretty quickly because I just could not put it down. I had to keep going back for more, and to find out who these characters would decide to be.

The ending was of course a doozy, and even with book 3 in the works I know nothing will ever be the same.

Not my cup of tea, despite loving all of Neuvel's other work. I found it much harder to get into and a bit of a slog.

The story of the Kibsu continues in this solid sequel to A History of What Comes Next. Although most middle books in a trilogy fail to fully push a storyline forward, that is simply not the case here. Mia and Lola continue their mission to “take them to the stars” while also dealing with their personal demons and very different personalities despite being essentially one and the same. Or rather one and The Hundred. Their search for the meaning behind an ancient bow that belonged to their ancestor adds a thrilling element that keeps the storyline moving at a fast pace. The song titled chapters help set the stage for the space race of the 60’s-80’s and the chapters on past Kibsu and real life female astronomers is riveting. I look forward to reading the next book in the series to see where the Tracker and Kibsu take us next. 3.5 Stars

A huge thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with this free advanced reader ebook in exchange for an honest review.

Thanks to Macmillan-Tor/Forge and Netgalley for an advanced reader’s copy of this book.

Mia is the 100th in a generation of identical alien women named the Kibsu who outwardly appear completely human and have inherited a mandate to do all they can to get humanity able to travel to the stars. Each has one daughter to take up the mantle and they live by a rule of there cannot be three for long- thus the grandmother usually has to be the one to die. Despite the legacy, information has not reliably been passed down across the 3,000 years, and Mia no longer has clarity about her ancestors past and why they have this singular mission. Moreover, each generation has to guess her way into how to best support humanity’s space exploration breakthroughs.

Another family group of male aliens, filled with rage and hostility and known as the Trackers, has the singularly mission of stopping the women and recovering an ancient Sphere that they believe will enable them to put out a beacon from Earth to their race in order to find them. What’s unclear is whether the aliens will then surge to Earth to destroy humanity, and thus the race to the stars is actually a goal of salvaging humanity before this happens. Among the Trackers, Samael having been close to his human mother who’s softened much of the brutality inherent in his genes and the actions of his brothers and father, leads his brothers on a quest in Egypt based on an image of an ancient priestess holding up the elusive Sphere.

The year is 1968, and huge steps in space exploration from landing on the moon to setting up a space station to sophisticated probes to investigate the planets of the Milky Way unfold during the novel.
Mia has spent the 1960s raising her daughter Lola on Mallorca, until having to flee when Trackers catch up to them. Traveling around the world, they gather word about an ancient bow discovered in China that has symbols on it in their alien language. Lola becomes passionate about deciphering what it says.

Mia reaches an either brave or brash decision to stopping running and to confront the Trackers, and with that the tense plot is primed for the next book in the series!

The second book in Sylvain Neuvel’s Take them to the Stars trilogy Until the Last of Me is, if anything, more baffling than the first. The first book of this series - A History of What Comes Next - introduced readers to a multigenerational pursuit of a female line of aliens, known as the Kibsu, by a male line of hunters. At the same time the Kibsu were following their millennia long purpose to take humanity to the stars, by helping kickstart the space race. As a result, that book was a kind of shadow history of the 1940s, 50s and 60s as the main characters nudged and supported both the US and Russia into space (while trying not to be discovered by the ultra-violent hunters).
When Until the Last of Me opens, two of the Kibsu remain (although there can only ever be 3 at any one time) – Mia and her identical eleven year old daughter Lola. They are soon discovered and go on the run again. While on the run they try to influence the science behind the Pioneer and then Voyager space probes. But as the text makes clear, someone else inside the space agency had already worked out the maths so really the two are just bystanders to these events. Mia and Lola’s focus is on deciphering an ancient poem, written by a distant Kibsu ancestor, which may be the key to an artefact that they have been charged with protecting. At the same time, three brothers, hunters of the Kibsu are on a different trail but one that may bring them closer to their prey.
After the first book it seemed that the series was heading in a certain direction. But following the second book it is really hard to understand what the point of this series is. The most that can be said, based on the detailed historical notes that follow, is that Neuvel is really interested in history and wanted to find a way to talk about it in a fictional setting. But that does not actually make for an engaging or interesting narrative. The shadow power behind the space race that drove the first book is completely jettisoned here, with the exception of short, fairly irrelevant, chapters chronicling the various destinations of Voyager 2. Instead there is a strange, Indiana Jones-style hunt for an ancient artefact that theoretically these characters had been supposed to be protecting for millennia. And a parallel hunt that yields very little and seems to be just an excuse to send some characters to Egypt for a bit.
Until the Last of Me is still an interesting read but is likely to leave readers, particularly after a kind-of cliffhanger finale, wondering what the point of it all has been. Neuvel showed in The Themis Files an ability to shift direction in each volume of a trilogy so there is still some hope that he has a grand plan for book three of this series that will make the whole of the journey worthwhile.

I was so excited to read this follow up to "A History of What Comes Next" and I was far from disappointed. This was a wonderful, enjoyable book, and I devoured it. This one is based on the later years of the space race, so readers get to experience Mia's thoughts and opinions on satellites and space probes like Voyager 1. We also get to see more perspectives than just Mia - some chapters are written from the point of view of her daughter, and the Tracker. All in all, a fantastic sequel that left me wanting more.

I'm at a bit of a loss here. While I love this novel, more or less unequivocally, it really made me wonder what I enjoyed so much about the first in the series (do not read this without first reading...the first). Because the feeling, the experience of the thing, really is completely different, if sort of wonderful in either case.

Wow! This is even better than the first one! I literally stayed up all night, unable to put the book down! I want more, more, more!

Always follow the rules: “Always run, never fight”, says the first one, the most important one. It seems easy enough, doesn’t it? Generation after generation, Mia’s family has done exactly that and now she is so, so close to completing their mission.
Alas, nothing is never as easy as it might first seem.
Once again (it already happened with ‘A History of What Comes Next’, the first novel in the Take them to the Stars saga), I find myself in the conundrum of wanting to explain (almost) everything and, at the same time, trying to avoid the full-mind-bending-spoiler area.
The solution for that conundrum, for me at least, is to emphasize Sylvain Neuvel’s style, his intricate way of communicating even the most technical and difficult parts of a novel that it is difficult by itself, heavily relying on the readers ability to pick up the pace and follow the different layers of the story as they very slowly and then suddenly reveal themselves.
The result is a satisfying follow-up to its predecessor, a gift wrapped in such a way that reading them together, back-to-back, could make, in my opinion, an even fuller experience.

Amazing!! Great follow-up to the previous book in this series and with Neuvel style which is always a hit!! I couldn't recommend it enough!