Review: Infinity Son by Adam Silvera

What: Infinity Son (Infinity Cycle #1) by Adam Silvera

Who: HarperTeen

When: January 14th 2020

How: A copy of this novel was provided by SparkPoint Studio.

Growing up in New York, brothers Emil and Brighton always idolized the Spell Walkers—a vigilante group sworn to rid the world of specters. While the Spell Walkers and other celestials are born with powers, specters take them, violently stealing the essence of endangered magical creatures.

Brighton wishes he had a power so he could join the fray. Emil just wants the fighting to stop. The cycle of violence has taken a toll, making it harder for anyone with a power to live peacefully and openly. In this climate of fear, a gang of specters has been growing bolder by the day.

Then, in a brawl after a protest, Emil manifests a power of his own—one that puts him right at the heart of the conflict and sets him up to be the heroic Spell Walker Brighton always wanted to be.

Brotherhood, love, and loyalty will be put to the test, and no one will escape the fight unscathed.

Infinity Son is Adam Silvera’s first foray into the fantasy genre, and unfortunately I could tell. Not because it was bad – it was actually quite good and I did enjoy it – but because it needed some work. Sometimes I would be reading and something would happen and I would be absolutely thrown because there was no description of what had occurred to make that something happen. For example, characters would suddenly appear without any introduction. These lack of information moments usually took place when a lot of things were going on (like during a fight), and it felt like they needed more scene planning to have things make more sense and flow more easily.

I also felt like Infinity Son could have done with some more length so that characters and their relationships could have time to develop between action scenes and dramatic reveals. I know that the two main characters, Emil and Brighton, love each other because they’re brothers. But I would have loved to see more of their brotherly relationship and interactions so that I could feel their heartache along with them whenever something happened to the other. This goes for all the characters in the book, especially the ones that only had a chapter or so from their perspective.

When Emil joins the Spell Walkers (a group of young adults with magical abilities) there is no period of time when they all get to know each other, so it made it hard for me to believe in them as a team. The core group has known each other for years and those connections were shown to an extent, but in the end I still felt like I didn’t really know any of them, or why Emil and Brighton loved them so much (even before they knew them as people and only loved them from afar as celebrities). Found family is one of my favourite tropes and there was so much potential for this story to really develop that but it was a missed opportunity.

A lot of Infinity Son surrounds people killing mythical creatures to gain their powers. Reading about this kind of thing is incredibly difficult for me, even if those creatures aren’t real. I wish I had known that so much of the novel was about animal cruelty and death, just so I knew what I was going in to. I’m hoping there is less of it in the next novel, or that there is a storyline around saving these creatures from being murdered for power but I will have to wait and see, I guess.

In the end, I did enjoy Infinity Son. I do feel like there was definitely room for improvement in quite a few areas, and it will be interesting to see if the sequel adds to these lacking areas. In saying that, I think Infinity Son would serve well as a teen’s first foray into the fantasy genre as it is quite easy to wrap your head around the magic system, and the story set in the real world.

© 2021, Chiara @ Books for a Delicate Eternity. All rights reserved.

trigger warning