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Thanks to NetGalley and Simon Pulse for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.
Release Date: August 6th, 2019
496 Pages
Synopsis: They may have escaped Sanctuary, but Kenzie and her friends are far from safe.
Ex-Omnistellar prison guard Kenzie and her superpowered friends barely made it off Sanctuary alive. Now they’re stuck in a stolen alien ship with nowhere to go and no one to help them. Kenzie is desperate for a plan, but she doesn’t know who to trust anymore. Everyone has their own dark secrets: Omnistellar, her parents, even Cage. Worse still, she’s haunted by memories of the aliens who nearly tore her to shreds—-and forced her to accidentally kill one of the Sanctuary prisoners, Matt.
When Kenzie intercepts a radio communication suggesting more aliens are on the way, she knows there’s only one choice: They must turn themselves in to Omnistellar and destroy the ship before the aliens follow the signal straight to them. Because if the monstrous creatures who attacked Sanctuary reach Earth, then it’s game over for humanity.
What Kenzie doesn’t know is that the aliens aren’t the only ones on the hunt. Omnistellar has put a bounty on Kenzie’s head—-and the question is whether Omnistellar or the aliens get to her first.
Last year’s Sanctuary ended with a huge cliffhanger so I’ve been dying to get my hands on this sequel. After staying up until almost 2:00 in the morning reading Containment, I can honestly say that it’s even better than the previous book.
While I enjoyed Sanctuary and thought it was action-packed, I did feel that character development was lacking. Well, Caryn Lix has certainly addressed that here. Not only does she fill in more details of Kenzie’s background, but she also fleshes out the backstories of some of the more involved secondary characters. The cast has also developed into a true United Nations of diversity, which I love. China, Egypt, Native American, Irish, and Russian cultures are represented here. And while those cultural differences are part of who the characters are, they don’t define them.
The plot itself picks up exactly where the previous book ended. The survivors who managed to scape the carnage on Sanctuary have been left utterly demoralized and traumatized. And now they’re being hunted by not only the monstrous aliens they barely managed to escape from, but also the sinister company known as Omnistellar who apparently has its own agenda for the survivors and the alien ship they’re flying. For a story where the actual monsters don’t appear until the last half of the book, the pace never slowed down one iota. Once I started this, I couldn’t put it down and finished it in less than 4 hours. The ending unfortunately is another cliffhanger, so I’m praying that the third book is no more than a year away because I’ve really become emotionally attached to Kenzie and her friends.
I highly recommend both Sanctuary and Containment for older teens and adults who love science fiction/horror along the line of the Alien movies. These pulse-pounding books are definitely not for the faint-hearted. Between the blood and gore, and the non-stop suspense, they are nightmare-inducing and will undoubtedly cause many a reader a sleepless night!
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