Goodreads Monday is a weekly meme that was started by @Lauren’s Page Turners but is now currently being hosted by Emily @ Budget Tales Book Blog. This meme is quite easy to follow – just randomly pick a book from your to-be-read list and give the reasons why you want to read it. It is that simple.

This week’s book:

The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei

Blurb from Goodreads

Yume Kitasei’s The Deep Sky is an enthralling sci fi thriller debut about a mission into deep space that begins with a lethal explosion that leaves the survivors questioning the loyalty of the crew.

They left Earth to save humanity. They’ll have to save themselves first.

It is the eve of Earth’s environmental collapse. A single ship carries humanity’s last hope: eighty elite graduates of a competitive program, who will give birth to a generation of children in deep space. But halfway to a distant but livable planet, a lethal bomb kills three of the crew and knocks The Phoenix off course. Asuka, the only surviving witness, is an immediate suspect.

Asuka already felt like an impostor before the explosion. She was the last picked for the mission, she struggled during training back on Earth, and she was chosen to represent Japan, a country she only partly knows as a half-Japanese girl raised in America. But estranged from her mother back home, The Phoenix is all she has left.

With the crew turning on each other, Asuka is determined to find the culprit before they all lose faith in the mission—or worse, the bomber strikes again.

Why I Want To Read It

Time does fly fast. Sometimes I feel like the weekend is just a fleeting moment that rarely lingers. Just like that, it is Monday again. What’s more, is that today is the second to the last Monday of March. We are about to draw to a close to the first quarter of the year. The year is nearly a quarter done. I sure hope that the first three months of the year have been kind to everyone. If it went the other way, I hope that the remaining nine months will be brimming with good news and good tidings. I hope that the rest of the year will be great. I hope it will be filled with fun, adventure, and happiness. More importantly, I hope everyone will be healthy in mind, body, and spirit, for the rest of the year.

On another note, I hope you started your work week on the right note. I hope that the in the coming week, you will be able to accomplish everything you set out to achieve. I hope that your week will be productive. However, if you are not up to it, I hope you spend the week resting and recovering. More importantly, I hope everyone is doing well, in body, mind, and spirit. As has been customary I am kickstarting the blogging week with a fresh Goodreads Monday update. In the past two months, I have been immersed in the works of British and Irish literature. Although I still have quite a long list of unread works from this part of the literary world, I am can say that I have made quite a lot of progress. However, for this Goodreads Monday update, I am not going to feature a work of a British or Irish writer who is part of my reading list. Rather, I am featuring Yumi Kitasei’s The Deep Sky.

Prior to this year, I have never heard of Yume Kitasei nor had I encountered any of her works. From the name alone, I can surmise that she had Japanese origins and sure enough she does although she is based in Brooklyn. I also learned that her stories, mostly works of speculative fiction, appeared in various literary publications and journals such as New England Review, Catapult, SmokeLong Quarterly, Baltimore Review, and Nashville Review. However, she has not published a novel yet until 2023, making The Deep Sky her debut novel. In fact, it was while searching for 2023 debut novels that I came across her novel. It came in highly recommended, hence, it didn’t take too much for me to be convinced to add the book to my own (perpetually) growing reading list.

Speaking of speculative fiction, the book piques my interest because it reminds me of another work of speculative fiction by another Japanese-American writer: Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark. How High We Go in the Dark was also Nagamatsu’s debut novel and was part of my 2022 Top 10 Books I Look Forward To. It was an ambitious work, a novel of many ideas that left a deep impression on me. I am hoping that The Deep Sky will be equally as engaging and impressive, if not even better than How High We Go in the Dark. I am expecting a kind of dystopian society; dystopian fiction has become vogue lately. Is society headed for a breakdown that this subject has become prevalent in literature? One can only surmise, especially with the events that have been gripping the world lately, e.g. inflation, bankruptcy, warfare.

The book is to be released on July 18. I sure hope I get to obtain a copy of the book. How about you fellow reader? How was your Monday? What books have you added to your reading list? Do drop it in the comment box. For now, happy Monday and, as always, happy reading!