Editorial Review: Hachi + Araine // Awake | The Dream Series: Book 1 by Michael G. Hurston
After a thousand years of silent cryosleep, waking alone in a world so vastly different to the one they knew before the cryopod, Hachi and Araine find themselves barreling towards a terrifying truth about not just themselves but the whole system.
When Hachi entered the cryopod, they were very much not alone, they had been accompanied by many other Tau-born making the same journey - but this is one of only a few things they can be sure of. Beyond her immediate companions, Hachi finds that her memories of her life before the pod are blurry and out of reach. The moment Hachi awakes is full of violence - at first, it's the violence of the raiders who found her, but they soon find out that the newly awakened and naked woman is not the one at risk of harm.
After summoning Araine - her golem - to her and taking the ship back, Hachi uses the vast technologies of the ship to learn at least some of what has happened in the last ten centuries. To say that it is not good news would be an understatement - the Tau-born, Hachi's people, are largely gone and their arrival in the Sol system triggered a series of events that have resulted in widespread death and destruction. Meeting Sara, seemingly by chance, changes everything.
Sara is a salvager - a distractingly beautiful salvager - who just so happens to have found a potential cache of Tau-born and golem equipment. Even if it is potentially too good to be true it's also too much of an opportunity to pass up. The fact that Sara seems to be entirely accepting of Hachi's differences and even intrigued by the psychic link between Hachi and Araine doesn’t hurt either. When it becomes clear that not everything is how it should be, the trio embark on a hunt across the system for answers while dealing with their own vulnerabilities and flaws.
Hachi + Araine // Awake (Book One in The Dream Series) brings the reader along for the journey as Hachi discovers her own identity and what really happened. It is a fast-paced narrative with a lot to digest early on, the in-universe history is clearly vast and the prose hints at there being even more than what is delivered on page. The interplay between Hachi's lack of social knowledge and her prowess in battle is interesting especially in combination with her companions’ varying strengths.
Hachi + Araine // Awake is a fun read with interesting characters that readers will want to follow into the rest of the trilogy.
