My Rating ~ Four stars

4-gold-stars copy

RELEASE DATE: 6 November 2018

Publisher: Entangled Teen

Format: E-ARC

Source: Received from Entangled Teen via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review

Blurb

Cyclo, the first and largest biological ship of its kind, is dying. A small crew of mercenaries have handed over the rights to their life to document the death of the ship, but the abandoned ship is anything but abandoned―one girl has been left behind.

Hana has known nothing but the isolation of a single room and the secret that has kept her there for seventeen years. When she meets Fennec, the boy assigned to watch her, she realizes that there is a world she has yet to experience but she is doomed to never meet.

When crew members begin mysteriously dying, Hana and Fenn realize that they are racing against the death of the ship to find a way to survive―unless someone kills them even before Hana’s truly had a chance to live.

Review

Many thanks to Entangled Teen for providing me with this E-Arc of Toxic in exchange for an honest review.

Life on the ship Cyclo is closely monitored and the population is capped at 1000. Unknown to the rest of the crew, there is a 1001st member. That person is Hana. Hidden by her mother for 16 years, Hana wakes up one day to an empty ship. Everyone has evacuated without her. Cyclo has been Hana’s only friend for her whole life and they communicate easily, but now Cyclo is dying. When a crew arrive to document the ship’s demise, it’s not as straightforward a mission as they had anticipated – especially when they discover Hana is still aboard.

Sci-fi is always really hit and miss for me, but Toxic was just the right mix of haunting and nerve-wracking. I did find it hard to remember some of the crew weren’t human (mostly because I just don’t particularly enjoy reading about alien races, which is often why I avoid sci-fi) but in this case it didn’t distract me from the story at all. I found it a little difficult to wrap my head around the concept of the bio-ship at first, but the more Cyclo cemented as an AI in my mind, the more engrossed I became.

Toxic was a story that was sometimes horrifying and sometimes heartbreaking. I’ll be adding it to the small, but growing, list of YA sci-fi books I’ve really enjoyed!

Also, I can’t not mention the cover – look at how gorgeous it is!

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