Audiobook Review: The Genesis Wars (The Infinity Courts #2)

Author: Akemi Dawn Bowman

Narrator: Mizuo Peck

Audiobook Length: 11 hours 29 minutes

Black Mirror meets Marie Lu’s Warcross in Nami’s continuing adventures as she fights to free her friends in this high-stakes sequel to The Infinity Courts by award-winning author Akemi Dawn Bowman.

It’s been ten months since Nami narrowly escaped the Four Courts and Ophelia’s wrath. Ten months since she was betrayed by someone she once considered a friend. Someone she poured her heart out to. And now her family here in the afterlife are gone, captured, and Nami is utterly alone.

On the run, only steps ahead of the AI forces pursuing her, and desperate to free her friends, Nami must take the allies she can find, even if she doesn’t fully trust them. And as she tests the limits of her own power, she must also reckon with the responsibility that entails.

Stakes are high as Nami navigates old enemies, unexpected allies, and an ever-changing landscape filled with dangers and twists at every turn. Along the way, she’ll learn powerful truths about who she can trust and the sacrifices that must be made in order to fight for a better, freer world for all. 

The Genesis Wars picks up right where The Infinity Courts left off while setting itself up for the final novel in the trilogy. As a fair warning, the cliffhanger ending of this novel will make you want to immediately pick up the next novel, which, unfortunately, will not be published until 2023. It is going to be a difficult wait for the next book to be released. This novel continues to follow Nami, who woke up after a tragedy in the mortal world in Infinity, a world created from human consciousness for those to go in the afterlife. Here AI and humans come together in this world, which is unfortunately ran by an evil AI Queen, Ophelia.

The story opens ten months after the events of the first novel with Nami trying to process the aftermath involving an incident with Prince Caelan, Ophelia’s son. She has escaped the Four Courts and is now residing in the Borderlands. She is trying to gather support and faces resistance in her current location, so she decides to venture to the Court of War. While the first novel focused a lot on the Court of Victory, it was interesting to see the world expand into more settings. Along for the ride are her allies, Kasia and Nix. As the location of the story shifts to the Court of War, the reader gets a further insight into Prince Ettore, Caelan’s brother.

Nami deals with the guilt of trusting the wrong people in the first novel and is now trying to make things right. She is on a mission to find and ally herself with The Rebellion while trying to make sense of everything along the way. As Nami has not been in Infinity long, there is still a learning curve for her to fully understand everything around her. In the first novel, she was a little more stubborn in her way of thinking and is now becoming a little more open while still maintaining her stubborn ways. She has some nice growth in this story, but still has more to go and I cannot wait to see her further develop as a character.

The beginning of this story begins slowly as the author builds up the situation. I do with there was a little bit more information to recap at the start as it took me a minute or two to put all the pieces back together. The novel does pick up once Nami begins her journey to War and then continues to build to the cliffhanger. As with most stories there are many twists and turns along the way, and I enjoyed how the author introduced each of them. There were some places that did drag a little, which was to be expected in a middle novel, but I do wish there were little more in those places. Overall, the novel was well worth the read and I cannot wait to read the third novel!