The world building in this book was the star. It is one of the most fascinating post apocalyptic worlds I have ever encountered and I am still wanting more. However, the characters in this book were rather weak and I didn't connect with any of them except Star. That in itself would still have earned a 4 star as the world building was top notch. The big problem was about 80% in the writing shifted in a very noticeable way. I felt like I went from reading an adult novel to a young adult/childrens novel in regards to the characters themselves. This was rather jarring and disappointing.

Liked this one a lot.

Just the right mix of primitive post apocalyptic dystopia, meshed with surviving ruling class, and sprinkled with tech and weaponry.

The characters are good, the plot is interesting and engaging, and even though the end is not really detailed, it is a satisfying ending.

It also feels open ended, so maybe a future Lotus Red....., Lotus Yellow....

I didn't enter this book with specific expectations, but it just didn't get there for me. There are a TON of characters, a number of whom aren't clearly introduced or described, which made for some very confusing moments where I had to stop and backtrack. The story itself wasn't particularly compelling for me either. I think there is an audience for this book; I just wasn't part of it.

[This review is based on an advanced review copy received from the publisher via Edelweiss.]

Thoroughly enjoyed this (post apocalyptic, travelling band of survivalists, yup. Sold.) Has some flaws but enough gripping story, intriguing (and not fully explained, which is a good thing) world and interesting (if sometimes eyebrow raising) science ideas.

I love the setting of this book: a post-apocalyptic desert wasteland populated by ancient cyborgs, intelligent machines, enclosed residents of buried sanctuary cities and desperate survivors scraping a living by scavenging machine parts among the sands.

There are, if I counted correctly, eight POV characters including a rebellious young woman who's grown up crossing and re-crossing the desert with her doctor sister, a warlike artificial intelligence, the cyborg leader of a refugee colony and a trader's daughter who's more savvy than she first appears. This multiplicity of POVs, coupled with the extremely short chapters, is a problem because you repeatedly spend three pages in someone's head, then hurtle off into someone else's. This means that you never really get to know any of the characters well and so emotional moments towards the end of the book feel unearned.

There's also a frustrating amount of characters not telling each other much-needed pieces of information, dialogue that mostly feels like nothing a real person would ever say, and exposition delivered by POV characters thinking in detail about events that have happened 'off-screen.'

I still loved the setting by the end, I just wish the author could have done more with it.

Fairly interesting setting but the book is clumsily written, lacks interesting characters and gives away it's surprises before you invest in the mysteries.

In theory this should have been right up my alley: a post-apocalyptic story set in an almost unrecognisable far-future Australia, with a new society living in the high-tech ruins of their ancestors; certainly Lotus Blue has a note of some of my favourite adventure novels of all time, Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines series, with its centuries-old cyborg super-soldiers, reawakened orbital weapons and swashbuckling sandships. But it never really felt like it came together. Aside from having far too many characters and probably a hundred too many pages of padding, it lacks - ironically - a spark.

DNF - after over a week and less than 100 pages read, I had to throw in the towel. The world was fascinating but the amount of characters thrown at the reader throughout the first few chapters made it very hard to actually understand or become submerged in that world. I never did get drawn into the story.

Setting aside around 40 pages in. I was enjoying the Australian tint to it all, and it's a rich, evocative post-apocalyptic sandscape that Sparks lays out with vivid detail, but it's just a bit too sci-fi/post-apoc/cyberpunk for me to get into it.

Lotus Blue reminds me of what Mad Max could have been if they lacked resources. Back to the ideas of camels and slow-moving caravans, we have a sand-based adventure that has echoes of Tatooine and various Glenda Larke or Sean Williams worlds - yet this of course is utterly Sparks' own - and just another mark of how the endless plains of Australian emptiness have made their mark on our writers.

We're quickly thrown into a handful of characters, each vivid and although many to keep track of, they seem instantly like characters we've known for longer than half a chapter. Although there are many characters to choose from, the main protagonists are Star and her sister Nene who are the medics in the caravan, though Star dreams of things far greater - like somehow making their fortune enough to stay put somewhere, and opening a clinic in some back alley they can call home. Despite her child-like self-centredness we're still endeared to her simply for her drive and outlook on life, and how she faces her regrets head on, and has such a will to save not only herself, but her sister.

The plot is lively and action non-stop, making this book fly by and seem shorter than it really is. What really works about this novel is the history that makes the world-building sing, as we hear how their world is now, thanks to errors and calamity of old. Sparks is a genius of climate change and it shows in this book.

Overall, this novel has so much going for it, and it's brilliantly delivered.