Audiobook Review – Junkyard Cats by Faith Hunter, Narrated by Khristine Hvam (3.5/5 stars)

Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Science Fiction
Length: 5 hours and 2 minutes
Publisher: Audible Original
Release Date: January 2nd, 2020
ASIN: B082M2SC54
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: Audiobook for free from Audible Originals
Rating: 3.5/5 stars

“After the Final War, after the appearance of the Bug aliens and their enforced peace, Shining Smith is still alive, still doing business from the old scrapyard bequeathed to her by her father. But Shining is now something more than human. And the scrapyard is no longer just a scrapyard, but a place full of secrets that she has guarded for years.

This life she has built, while empty, is predictable and safe. Until the only friend left from her previous life shows up, dead, in the back of a scrapped Tesla warplane. Clutched in her cold fingers is a note to Shining – warning her of a coming attack.

With dread, Shining realizes: Someone knows who she is. Someone knows what she is guarding. Will she be able to protect the scrapyard? Will she even survive? Or will Shining have to destroy everything she loves to keep her secrets out of the wrong hands? ”

Series Info/Source: This seems to be the first book in a new series but I wasn’t able to find out if the story will be continued. I got this for free as an Audible Original through my Audible membership

Audiobook Quality (4/5): The audiobook was well done.

Story (3/5): This was a decent start to a new sci-fi series by Faith Hunter. It’s set on a future Earth where WW3 devastated everything. Our main protagonist is trying to make a living dealing black market scrap…or so it seems at first. The story is decent but is plagued with tons of fake science fiction terms and a dense background history.

Characters (5/5): I enjoyed the characters, the war bot, and of course the cats. Lots of amazing characters here.

Setting (4/5): The post-apocalyptic/sci-fi setting was well done and there was a lot of good action in here.

Writing Style (3/5): My main complaint is that the explanation of the history that led to this world was pretty dense at times. There are a ton of sci-fi terms thrown around. Being that I was listening to this in audiobook format, I think I missed some background just because of how quickly it was covered and how complicated and dense it was. This whole throwing around too many sci-fi terms can be a big problem with reading science fiction, it was something that was poorly done in this book and could have been handled a lot better

Summary (3.5/5): Overall I have mixed feelings about this one. I was really excited to see a new series by Faith Hunter. I loved the characters and thought the world was intriguing. However, I have a lot of problems with the huge amounts of info-dumping and the denseness of the sci-fi stuff thrown around. To be fair I stopped reading her Jane Yellowrock series because I had the same issues with how complicated she was making the magic system and how long she was spending explaining it in that series. I feel like making things a bit simpler or at least not dumping so much complicated info on the readers so quickly would really help to unmuddle this story.