There was a lot to like about this book. Luxury space ship for privileged class, a mystery thread and plotting on board ship. The context was interesting in how political decisions were made as to who escaped dying Earth. The novel lost my interest in the middle and had some action at the end. I am not sure I connected with the characters. Thank you to #netgalley and the publisher for an ARC.

This was a fun mixture of sci-fi, locked room mystery and speculative fiction!
Four friends get caught up in a decades old murder when they attend a reunion on the Altaire, a luxury space resort. All four have separate motivations for attending the reunion, but they're all trying to accumulate points that will make it more likely that they will get to inhabit Mars in the near future. As they butt heads with each other, something else is brewing on the ship that they aren't aware of, and as everything comes to a head, you will be glued to the finale pages!

Ultra lux space resort, unsolved murder mystery from 20 years ago, a bunch of uber-priviliged one-percenters who ruled the world (and the people). What should have been a reunion weekend full with debauchery and excess turned out to be something unexpected. I was looking for a fast-paced reading with a cinematic feel and hoo boy this book popped up at the right moment. The nearly-destroyed Earth with its natural disasters due to climate change impacts presented a grim background, with different impact to different classes. The commentary on socioeconomic class and racism might feel too on the nose for some, but I appreciate the inclusion. This is the first time I read a full-length novel by a Filipino writer, which is cool and I need to check out many more.

Found the novel to be an interesting concept, focusing on a group of 4 old friends reuniting at a fancy space hotel for a school reunion. There seemed to be a lot of plot lines that didn't really mesh and I felt that I was jumping around loads without getting the chance to become invested in the characters. This is especially prevalent on the worker uprising story which became the most prominent in the finale. I did enjoy some of the worldbuilding and the commentary on class and colonization. I was a fan of Victor Manibo's debut novel, but found this one to be less enjoyable.

The Altaire is a suborbital resort that caters to the richest of the rich. Every year they host reunions for the alumni of the Rochford, a boarding school that is also reserved only for the scions of the most elite families on Earth. A group of these alumni gather for their 25th class reunion, but overshadowing the gathering is the memory of a student that was found murdered senior year. His sister Ava is determined to use this opportunity to discover what happened, and who really killed him. The other guests are all obsessed with racking up points so they can be approved for Mars resettlement, and meanwhile the staff of the hotel have their own plans.

I expected to love this story, and it has all the elements I love – scifi floating hotel, super diverse cast, class tensions. Sadly it didn’t deliver. I can tell the author has some great ideas and put a lot of work into this, but it needed a lot more polish. In several places the writing itself was clunky and switched between tenses in a way that pulled me out of the story in confusion. For instance, “the reason that the arrangement worked, and will continue to work, was because Sloane knew Julian.”

Despite the very big stakes, I didn’t feel much tension. We’re clearly supposed to sympathize with the staff, and yet we spend much more story time with the guests and seeing their backstories. I felt like I didn’t really know the staff; their sole personality traits were that they were poor, overworked, and resentful. We only really got a tiny bit of story on one of them, and if we’re supposed to root for them, we need more. In the end, the murder mystery part seemed irrelevant and like just a misdirection.

The ending was also really unsatisfying. I completely understand the motivations, but… what happens next? There’s no way that kind of thing would be successful on a global scale. You’d need way more. Also, the idea that this was organized and pulled off in five places, so easily with almost no hiccups is unbelievable. Also there was a moment we saw a defense satellite shoot missiles… but where? Why? There are several plot threads that are just dropped, no explanation.

At the end of the book, it feels like there was zero character development. Even the ostensibly good guys did bad things, with no resolution or payoff. We saw no outcomes, no change, no consequences.

I agree with the message I think the book is trying to convey, and I think the author has potential. I think they just need more polish or better editing to pull it all together, to show this story off to its very best.

Escape Velocity releases on May 21, and thank you to NetGalley and Kensington Books for an advance digital copy in exchange for my honest review!

I loved The Sleepless so it was no surprise I vibed here too. Closed room mysteries and class warfare combine to be a potent mix, and the pacing is great. I loved the melding of plotlines and timelines, and the writing style really serves the pace of the story.

You get what you deserve. At least at the high end resort in the sky. But not everyone agrees. Very different take on future Earth. Read to see what that means.

Thank you Erewhon Books for the eARC via NetGalley.

Escape Velocity has all the vibes of a conspiracy-among-the-wealthy-elite set in a slick science fiction future that seriously considers the ramifications of off-planet colonization where on-planet resource extraction has seemingly fully won. In the unimaginably luxurious reunion party of a one-percent-of-the-one-percent graduating class, the attendees each have their own reasons beyond mere celebration. At the same time, the staff have their own machinations at play. This complex narrative weaves well-fleshed characters into a spectacular ending.

The pace of the story is quick and compelling. It's easy to feel sympathy for each of the unimaginably wealthy attendees, as they justify to themselves their own wealth and happenstance. There is a pressure of needing to go to Mars for each attendee, vying for limited spots in accordance to a MERIT score which, of course, had always been designed to be biased towards them. The novel takes great care to undermine the narrative of each of the wealthy's achievements being attributable to their inherent superiority-- for every ridiculously accomplished executive or director or heiress, there is an equally skilled, intelligent, conspiratorial staff member assigned to them. This contrast gives added depth in that not only are we exploring the vying for hierarchy but also exploring how such hierarchies are artificially constructed.

I didn't find this to be the sort of story where you really "root for" anyone, except for maybe Ava, an elite woman whose abusive brother was found murdered in their childhood and where a lower-class girl took the blame officially-- unofficially, rumors have always been spread it was Ava. Other compelling characters include Laz, a Filipino graduate who awkwardly tries to bond with the other Filipinos on staff and Sloane, who lives a presentation of high-class precariously after multiple family members had been sent to prison for fraud in his youth. In truth, each wealthy elite character is masterfully used to display all of the various intrigues that makes the rich and famous such celebrities to gossip over in real life. There is scandalous sex, murder, political games, all of it is here in one neat package.

But make no mistake, the staff will come with the bill eventually. And what a bill has been racked up.

First of all, thanks to Netgalley and Kensington Books for an eARC of Escape Velocity by Victor Manibo. I appreciated the novel's unique mix of mystery, thriller, and sci-fi with a social and class critique thrown in. The highly intriguing world and overall message made up for some of the characters and plot lagging towards the end. I will definitely be on the lookout for what the author does next.

It was an interesting book. The plot was quite unique, and I did very much enjoy the mix between thriller and science-fiction. I loved Ava’s character, she brought something to the story that I really appreciated. However, the other characters were a bit odd for me, especially Sloane that I hated. And the book was weirdly sexual, I did not vibe with that.

Thank you to Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for a honest review.

This was a great setup with an intriguing setting and mystery. However, the characters grew less likable as the story went on, and on the end I wasn't rooting for anyone. The ending was a disappointment.

before i give a review, i would like to thank netgalley and the publisher erewhon books for providing me an advanced copy.
now onto the actual review..
i love how genre defying this was, with a queer normative place that's outside our galaxy. the first half was an amazing science fiction story and the rest was a mystery. there should be more stories like this! i'm looking forward to see victor manibo's writing progress since he seems to be a somewhat debut author.
here are my complaints..
i thought the "star wars" reference when pio was introduced was totally awkward.. it made the story seem very modern that way. plus that whole bit about "why do we need that many" regarding how many people of color there were.

Earth is not doing well. The great hope for the future is colonizing Mars. Those with enough merit points will get to go - everyone has a chance or so the “haves” say. The reality is it a cut throat competition among the “haves” - others need not even try. Rochford Academy graduates are definitely”haves”. This story is set on a super luxury space station resort where a class of Rochford grads are celebrating their 25 year reunion. The grads have all gotten to interesting places in life but some have done better than others. Echos of old relationships, rivalries and hurts are still there. Ava is attending in hopes of discovering the truth about her broths death 25 years ago. While the grads are busy being self absorbed other things are happening - one really should notice the staff.
Thanks to NetGalley for an eGalley of this title.

There's one thing that I fully trusts Manibo's books to make me do - and that's think!

Just like The Sleepless, Escape Velocity has the same feeling of a social, cultural, environmental, and political commentary on human existence. For this sophomore book, that commentary comes with an upstairs-downstairs angle, a murder mystery, an exquisitely developed world with epistolary-like chapter interludes, somewhat unreliable narration, a non-linear timeline, and a lot of suspense.

Stylistically, this book attempts to do a lot of things at the same time that can be hard to pull off in a way that feels cohesive. For me, the result lands at a solid 90%. More or less. For example, as the narrative follows a large ensemble cast, it can at times feel like the reader is being served too much exposition in a short amount of time, which did at times prevent me from a complete immersion into the characters. I feel the book could potentially have been slightly longer and thus have allowed for the depth of the characters to be delivered more through their actions than through dialogue and expostion, but that's likely a matter of preference.

I suspect the ending might be polarizing. For my part, I couldn't have seen the book end any differently than what it did, so I was plenty satisfied. For better or for worse; there's no easy ending here (just as in real life).

I'm excited to see where Manibo goes next!

A pretty addictive read that starts out with someone drifting in space and ends with a totally new perspective on that lonely person in a spacesuit. The publisher taglines this as a "twisty new near-future genre-bending thriller: Knives Out in space with a Parasite twist" and that is a pretty spot-on description. There's a high school reunion in space bringing together a whole lot of rich people with old loves and grudges surfacing. Old sins come home to roost (with a vengeance), and there's a simmering upstairs/downstairs vibe in the slow reveal of the class-differences between the rich guests and the staff working on the ritzy space station they are visiting. I was hooked from the beginning and stayed hooked for a somewhat bumpy space-ride.

This started out really well, intrigue, unsolved murder, but the “look how horrible these people and their system is” dragged on a bit too long for my taste. I lost interest around the half way mark. The author dies a great job of depicting the privilege and non privileged sides of society, but the how behind the MARS points didn’t jive - just a dad being upset? But I do think others who have more patience might enjoy this.

It's a good and entertaining story with multidimensional characters and cool twists. I enjoyed reading it and appreciate the well-thought-out plot and the author's ability to keep the reader engaged. Worth a shot.

I always think it's a bad sign when I've read a book and, if I don't review it immediately, I have to look at the blurb/other people's reviews to try and remind myself about it - unfortunately, Escape Velocity is one of those books.

The basic premise is that it's set on a space habitat, at a time when people are trying to finagle their way into being the first settlers on Mars. There's a system in place that people are meant to use, gaining points in relation their expertise in various areas, but we quickly find out that the rich people are using their wealth to take shortcuts and the people who work there (who have gained that same expertise through actually working in those kinds of environments) are cut out. No surprises there! There's also a murder and a budding mutiny among the service workers, so there's plenty going on.

Still didn't 100% grab me and I might not have read to the end if I wasn't planning to review it. Not the worst use of my time, and I'll definitely check out this author again, but I can't wholeheartedly say that it does what the blurb seems to promise.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, via Netgalley. This is my honest review of the book in question.

There was enough time between me reading the blurb and actually reading the book that I'd more or less forgotten the plot beyond the line 'Knives Out in space with a Parasite twist' and I think that improved the experience. Very much a book I recommend going into knowing the vibes but not necessarily the plot (coincidentally this is also how I consumed Parasite, having intentionally never watched a trailer and I think that was the best choice too).

My one gripe would be that, of the two overarching plot lines, one gets a lot more development than the other, leading to the second losing some if its bite. Even so I was gripped throughout and found the ending largely satisfying, if a little rushed. Definitely an instant favourite for me.

I breezed through this! The writing was engaging, the world and motivations believable, and I was roped in to root for the various characters. The kindle version had a few typos. The ending left me feeling unbalanced though. It seemed like how a triumphant manifesto would end rather than the real world version of events.