I'll first admit I had some difficulty getting into this novel. I picked it up in October on the recommendation of an astrophysics-enthused friend who insisted my equally astrophysics-enthused self needed this space opera in my life, and managed to read it in snatches stolen between classes, at work, and when I really should’ve been doing homework. Maybe that's why I never ended up fully invested—not until I was ten chapters away from the big ending and realized I'd been reading for hours without coming up for air. It likely has more to do with the fact that this novel, full of impressively accurate astrophysics, a concrete prediction of social, political, and economic structure, and a genuinely plausible alien virus was very different than what I usually read.

Leviathan Wakes takes place an unspecified amount of decades into the future, after humanity has colonized the rest of the solar system and constructed a number of stations drifting in/around the asteroid belt. Tensions between the Terran and Martian government are high, but even higher is that between the so-called "inners" and "outers"—citizens of the inner planets, Earth, Mars, and the moon, against citizens of the Belt and beyond. Earth is teetering on the edge of environmental crisis and overpopulation; Mars is undergoing a huge terraforming project; and in the Belt, the Outer Planets Alliance (OPA), branded as a terrorist organization by the Terran and Martian governments, is fighting against the Belt's exploitation by the "inners."

Told in the alternating POVs of Earther Jim Holden, executive officer (XO) of the Canterbury, an ice hauler moving from Saturn’s rings to Ceres Station, and Belter Joe Miller, a detective on Ceres Station working the missing person’s case of OPA operative Julie Mao, Leviathan Wakes captures both the "outer" and "inner" perspective amid the events of the novel.

Holden and Miller act as brilliant foils to each other. On one hand, Holden has a strict moral code and a habit of making impulsive, usually public decisions in an effort to stick to it—an accurate comment on his character was "a dumbass with a heart of gold." On the other, Miller's morals are skewed into a grayer area. Holden's obsession is his sense of honour, of right and wrong, whereas Miller's is Julie Mao, who he searches for with the desperation of a dying man in a desert chasing his oasis. Holden is your compass; his character arc is a speed bump. Miller's is a rollarcoaster.

The rest of Leviathan Wakes's cast comes just as unique and well-written, though not as integral or involved as they could be. Of Holden's crew, you have Earther Amos Burton, an engineer with no moral compass of his own; Martian Alex Kamal, an ex-military and very talented pilot; and Belter Naomi Nagata, the chief engineer and consistently the smartest person in the room. I do have to state that while I love the characters—specifically Holden and Miller—in book one the cast is predominantly male, which I think contributed to my having trouble getting into the novel originally. However! Naomi is one of the strongest female characters I have ever come across, and she makes up for any qualms I had about reading. (Also, as I write this review, I am on the eighth book of this series. The apparent lack of strong female characters does not remain an issue.) This is, however, where most of that star gets knocked off. I feel that, while the readers will really bond with Holden and Miller, you learn next to nothing about the rest of the crew, making it difficult to care about them to the extent that Holden does.

Moving on from the setting and characters—let's talk about the plot.

Leviathan Wakes is, above all, a book that subverts every expectation. I'd gotten to a point where I was getting cocky about my ability to predict plot twists, based on patterns, tropes, and unspoken "rules"—not with this novel! I predicted one (1) thing, and it wasn't even right. Never had I been so thoroughly confused about where the plot was going, until it all came together at the end. What Corey does so masterfully is weaves countless details into the narrative that seem unimportant—until everything clicks into place like a very complicated puzzle.

It isn't an easy, straightforward plot, either: anything that can go wrong, likely does. And what elevates these problems is, to me, their plausibility. They don't come out of nowhere. Social tensions are high; they play a part. Politics affect the plot, as do economics. And this is a space opera. Things go wrong in space all the time, and things going wrong in space often ends in death or near-death experiences. Though spaceships may be as common as cars in Leviathan Wakes's universe, think of how often you have to refill the tank, change a tire, get the weird rattling noise under the hood checked out—and now think of needing to do the astrospacial equivalent of "changing a tire" on your spaceship while light months away from any sort of civilization. Corey doesn't shy away from tripping up his characters any way he can, in a way that enrichs the plot.

And I won't bore you with too much science, but the astrophysics. Granted, I currently have an IB high schooler's grasp of astrophysics, so maybe they don't hold up to more advanced scrutiny, but in my experience, all of Corey's science checks out. Of course, it's dramatized in some aspects, and "Epstein drives," the lightspeed engines common in ships, don't actually exist, but the base science is solid and extremely gratifying to read. If you have even a casual interest in space travel and/or astrophysics, I highly recommend this series.

I highly recommend this series to everyone, really. If you like big, unique casts of characters, unpredictably clever plots, commentary on political, economic, and social conditions of society, high-stakes space battles, authentic astrophysics, gunfights, mysteries—and, oh yeah, alien viruses, you'll love The Expanse, beginning with Leviathan Wakes.