I had no idea what to expect from this book, and I'm still not sure how I feel about some parts of the story, but overall, I enjoyed it. Reading about Pike never fails to keep me entertained.

One of the things I love about Strange New Worlds are interactions between the characters, so reading about the crew being split up was a bit of a struggle at first, but it got better once I got into the story. However, I have to say, as much as I enjoyed reading about what Pike and Number One were going through, I wished for me of Uhura and Hemmer. Every time Uhura appeared I just wished for more of her point of view, because reading about her interactions with her empatherm friend was definitely one of the highlights of the story for me. Reading about Hemmer also gave me an unfair amount of feelings, honestly, but that might be because he's one of my favourite SNW characters.

The world-building was amazing, and the history of Epheska and people living on it was interesting, however, it took quite a while for me to actually warm up to any of them. The thing is, I already loved the crew of the Enterprise before picking up the book, so I knew I'd love reading about them. The new characters, however? It took me about half of the book to start caring about what happened to the Menders, Jennie, and Celarius, and I blame that on how many side characters were introduced in general. It's very difficult to give everyone depth when there are so many characters to focus on.

The chapters were short, which I found helpful, but somehow it still took me surprisingly long to read the book. The reason for that, I assume, was that some parts of the story were very dense at times, and some were just monotonous. It also felt like there was too much going on at once; too many points of view and too many side-plots. If this story was a part of the TV series, it'd definitely take more than two episodes to resolve everything properly. Including the maps of Epheska in the book, though? A very nice touch.

Overall, even if the story was a bit slow, I still enjoyed reading about the characters I love, and I can't wait to read more books about the  Strange New Worlds crew.