In trying to sort out my many, many thoughts and feelings about Truth of the Divine, Lindsay Ellis’s second book and the sequel to Axiom’s End, I don’t think I can get much further than what I said to my roommate a few days ago, as the two of us were chatting in our shared kitchen.

I was telling her that I had spent most of that day powering through a book I was supposed to review for my blog, and that I was hoping to finish it by that night. She asked me if the book was good, at least.

“I wouldn’t call it an enjoyable read,” I said after a long pause, “but it’s definitely an interesting read.”

Truth of the Divine is the second book in the Noumena series, and as with most sequels, it’s a little bit difficult to summarize without giving away plot spoilers, but here’s my best attempt. The book deals with the consequences of the massive political upheaval that occurred in book 1. Our protagonist, Cora, is acting as the official interpreter between her alien friend Ampersand and the government agency keeping tabs on him. At the same time, though, she’s navigating the new bond between her and Ampersand, which allows them to sense each other’s feelings. Between her new ability to feel what her alien refugee friend is feeling, and her own trauma from the events of book 1, Cora is, to put it lightly, straight up not having a good time. And that’s not good, because with the secret of the extraterrestrials now out to the public, the world needs her more than ever.

Enter Kaveh, a journalist and author who’s worked a little too closely with Cora’s own father, Nils Ortega. He’s out to prove that the aliens count as “persons” and are thus entitled to full human rights. When he learns a little bit too much about Cora and Ampersand’s situation, Cora has no choice but to trust him. Together, they try to do something that’s looking less and less possible with every passing day: convince the world that Ampersand and his fellow extraterrestrials deserve to be met with compassion, rather than hostility.

I won’t beat around the bush here: this is a very difficult read. There are content warnings at the start of the book. Read them. And take your time reading the book, because believe me, it’s a lot to take in in one sitting.

Truth of the Divine explores, in raw, excruciating detail, Cora’s PTSD stemming from the events of the first book. It depicts suicidal ideation, self-harm, panic attacks, and other heavy topics that, again, are listed in the content warnings. None of these things are taken lightly, or included just for the sake of it, but they are certainly present. It makes the book very difficult to read, but it also gives the reader a really good sense of the emotional toll everything is taking on the protagonist.

The book also expresses a kind of existential despair that I think will ring true for a lot of readers in 2021, in the midst of a global pandemic and a climate crisis. I was surprised by how familiar so much of this book felt. I saw the world facing unprecedented historical events, global unrest, mass panic, and an impending extinction event, and thought, hey, that sounds familiar!

Is that good? That’s probably not a very good sign, is it?

Seriously, though, I would urge readers to be careful when approaching Truth of the Divine, because it depicts some really heavy, really intense emotions and situations. But I think that it also has the potential be cathartic, even helpful, to readers who may have had to deal with some version of the emotions the characters experience in this book. I certainly appreciated it.

The other big storyline in Truth of the Divine is how the world at large is responding to the knowledge that there are aliens on Earth. How do we define a “person?” If aliens count as people, are they entitled to full human rights? What would it mean to extend full human rights to aliens? Do we need new laws pertaining to aliens – laws that account for their unique abilities? And if we deny them rights, will that open the door to further restrictions on the rights of actual human beings? All of these questions and more are explored as the world tries to figure out what the hell to do about the aliens in their midst. We see people respond to the situation in typical human ways. Some turn to conspiracy theories, authoritarianism, and bigotry, while others show remarkable curiosity and compassion.

(As an aside, this book includes several passages from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and as someone who just handed in a thesis on international refugee law, those passages evoked many strong reactions in me. I don’t know if it would have been better or worse if I had read it while actually writing my thesis.)

But enough about the heavy stuff. If you’ve read Axiom’s End, and/or you’re a fan of Lindsay Ellis’s, I know which question is at the front of your mind. It’s a question I was also asking before I picked up this book. It’s what everyone wants to know: Do Cora and Ampersand fuck?

The answer is no. And no, that’s not a spoiler; it is explicitly stated in the content warnings that they will not fuck in this book. I’m sorry if that’s disappointing. However, Cora and Ampersand’s relationship does evolve quite a lot in this book, and in really interesting ways. We also get to meet other aliens, and see them develop complex relationships with other humans. Keep in mind that the central question in Truth of the Divine is that of non-human personhood. The question of whether or not humans can form complex interpersonal relationships with the extraterrestrials is pretty significant to this issue. If you weren’t sold on human/alien relationships after Axiom’s End, I think this sequel will convince you. If were were already sold on it, then I think you’ll enjoy this book.

I would be lying if I said that I had fun reading Truth of the Divine. I can’t sit here and say that I tore through it, or that I was always excited to sit down and read it, or that I wish I could spend more time living in this world. But what I can say is that I couldn’t stop thinking about it after I finished it. My heart still twists with love and sympathy whenever I think about the characters that exist in this universe, and the challenges this world is facing. This is a deeply human story. It’s an honest look at human nature, at human societies, and at the difference between those things. It’s painful and raw and dark, but so honest and so inspiring at times. It hurt to read, but not necessarily in a bad way.

The middle section after they decide to rename Enola to Nikola is a bit confusing because the characters keep using both enola and nikola inconsistently.

The best thing about Truth of the Divine is the cover.

Now, the cover *is* absolutely gorgeous. Truly, truly beautiful. And I wanted so badly to find within its (digital) binding a book worthy of that cover. Unfortunately, Truth of the Divine isn’t it.

Truth of the Divine (by Lindsay Ellis) is the sequel to Axiom’s End and the second in a planned “Noumena” trilogy. Axiom’s End was a 2020 release and Ms. Ellis’s first novel, and that inexperience came through in that first effort; the writing was uneven, characters frequently thin, and the story could be called “tropey.” Nevertheless, I gave it three stars, and I hoped that the next volume would both see Ms. Ellis improve as a writer and flesh out some of the interesting threads found in Axiom’s End. However, after supposedly working on Axiom’s End for several years, her writing pace picked up (with this book 2 coming out in summer 2021 and book 3 coming in summer 2022) and the storyline suffered.

I read a digital ARC of Truth of the Divine, provided for free by NetGalley. Because this is an ARC, I’ll assume that the typos and grammatical errors will be fixed before full release, but that won’t solve the troubles of Truth of the Divine. I’m going to try and avoid too many
____
SPOILERS, but I will say that the book goes right back to the First Contact well, swapping in a new (male) character as the main human point-of-view for much of the story, along with a new alien companion to go with him. As for our heroine from book one, most of her storyline consists of her struggling with severe trauma following the events of the last book. Perhaps that struggle could have been compelling if well-portrayed, but mostly it made the story a big bummer. The new male character’s interactions with the heroine are also extremely troubling; ultimately, while there are certainly plenty of characters to dislike, there are really very few people to root for in this book. Nils (the heroine’s absent father) remains a completely unlikeable, larger-than-life character, whose name comes up time and time and time again but who ultimely does very little. As to the overarching storyline, it’s clear that the humans’ interaction with aliens are a ham-fisted metaphor for how we treat others of different cultures—especially since the author has numerous characters make that same point multiple times—but there’s nothing new or interesting there, just variations on what we already saw in the last book.

I could go on, but I think it suffices to say that I kept waiting for it to get good, and I’m still waiting. The book was really just a bummer, and it failed to offer rewarding tidbits to balance out that sense of general disappointment. As beautiful as this cover is, I won’t be getting a copy for myself, and I expect I’ll be skipping book 3.

3.5/5
I received an ARC from netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
The second installment in Lindsay Ellis Noumena series truly elevates the original story. It dives deeper into the interpersonal relationships between alien and human as well as the politics of extraterrestrials. Ellis does not shy away from the real life consequences of Coras and Ampersands relationship such as the PTSD caused by the events in the first book, how having multiple simphiles affects their relationship and how it distances her from her human friends and family.
The writing and storytelling has improved between her first novel and this one. The content explored I found much more intriguing as a reader, a sentiment I rarely feel about book series. I most likely feel this way because tonally Truth of the Divine reads more like Adult fiction where Axioms End felt more on the YA spectrum. Thematically the slight genre shift makes sense to me in terms of Coras mental state and journey, it's not a bad thing.
I found the beginning and end were really strong and interesting but it does have some pacing issues in the middle.

I'm very careful about requesting Advance Reader's Copy books. I try and request only those I am pretty sure I'll like based on previous knowledge of an author or the marketing copy provided I thought I had a winner with this selection as I had read the first book in the series, Axiom's End, and enjoyed it. Alas, this book was not up to par with Axiom's End. It brought in new focal characters--usually not a bad thing--but sidelined the main Alien that was so integral to the story in the first book. This is a dark book and deals with topics not everyone will like to read about. The author even gives a warning at the start of the book. I didn't find the topics off putting; what got me was the very slow pace of the book and the repetition. It seemed to me that the author kept restating in exhaustive detail the same points over and over again. And did I mention slow pace? Yes, this book seemed to take me forever to get through to the point where I set goals for number of pages read before I could take a break. I was determined to finish it and I admit, I did get invested enough in the new characters to want to find out what happened to them.

The book opens with a theme that is pivotal to the story: what constitutes the definition of being human and what rights these Aliens have. Cora is suffering from PTSD from an encounter in the first book and Ampersand is trying to help her. Then a light appears in the sky and a new Alien appears on Earth to join Ampersand. It also happens that a Pulitzer prize winning journalist, Kaveh, is near and Cora gives him one of her ear buds so he can communicate with this new creature he dubs Nikola. The story then centers on the three of them with a lot of time given over to the budding relationship between Kaveh and Cora. Proof is given to the world that there are Aliens being harbored by the U. S. Government and right-wing conspiracy nuts and leftist human rights groups are formed. The battle begins.

What made Axiom's End so engrossing, the story line of first contact, is missing from this book. Although Nikola and Kaveh go through the same learning process in getting to know one another, their story is just a restatement of what Cora and Ampersand have already gone through. Same story, different characters. This book could have done so much more with the Alien-Human relationships, but didn't. I did enjoy the theoretical discussion of person-hood and human rights and the controversy it caused. I also liked the alternate history angle although I thought the President should have played a larger role. Indeed, he wasn't heard from at all!

Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for this ARC in return for an honest review. The publication date is October 12, 2021`.

This book is the follow-up to the first in an alternative history, "Axiom’s End." That book, which began in 2007, posited that the US government had been covering up first contact with extraterrestrial life since 1971. A number of aliens had arrived at that time and were being kept in federal custody. A whistleblower, Nils Ortega, leaked the information and there was an uproar ever since, especially in the United States. President Bush was forced to resign, but the administration of President Cheney was also not releasing any information about the alien group. Now Cheney was being threatened in the presidential primary by Senator Todd Julian, part of a group that advocated total transparency about the aliens and opposed conferring “personhood” on them. They instead came up with a “Third Option.”

As argued by Jano Mirando, the constitutional lawyer heading up the Third Option Movement, the advanced intelligence of the ETs makes them a threat to existing humans.

Nils’ estranged daughter Cora Sabino, 21, got involved when she inadvertently was given the role of an interpreter for the alien she started to call Ampersand. Ampersand only arrived that year. In trying to help him, Cora almost died, but Ampersand repaired her body, saving her. Not only that, but Ampersand was able to form a “dynamic fusion bond” with Cora. Uniquely, because this bond common to ETS was occurring between a human and an amygdaline, as Americans call Ampersand’s race, it somehow conferred the ability to sense and share mood swings - normally unheard of in dynamic fusion bonding. Given all the fear, PTSD, and loneliness both were experiencing, this didn’t necessarily make each a good influence on the other.

In this book, Cora finds herself making common cause with the investigative journalist Kaveh Mazandarani. Kaveh, 35, is a former Rhodes Scholar, and twice nominated for a Pulitzer. He had collaborated with Nils at one point in exposing torture by the CIA but now was horrified by Nils, especially when he learned how negatively Nils affected Cora.

Kaveh was born in Iran but his family escaped after the revolution and resettled in LA. He understands full well the pain of outsider status and the easy appeal of hate and discrimination, and works with Cora to thwart the xenophobic goals of the Third Option. He also makes a friend of his own with another newly arrived alien he calls Nikola, after Nikola Tesla.

But Cora and Kaveh have more than the Third Option to deal with. The politicians associated with that movement have been successfully whipping up fear among radical groups prone to violence, made up of conspiracy theorists, Second Amendment advocates, Anti-Semites, and those who feel they “gotta defend us from all those dangerous aliens.”

Kaveh explains to Cora:

“The paradox of anti-government hysteria is it tends to lead to authoritarianism. The arrival of space aliens has not united humanity; they’ve only made us more tribal, more fractured, and it’s only going to get worse in the months and years to come. And now you have these proto-fascists arguing against the very idea of alien personhood and advocating for the creation of a whole different category of person altogether. One might almost say . . . three-fifths of a person.

. . . If they create a whole new class of person with fewer rights than a natural person, one created specifically for a nonhuman alien, how long do you think it will be before they start applying that to human aliens, as well?”

He points out, “If it’s a reactionary movement rooted in fear, the first thing that happens is the revocation of hard-won human rights.”

Eventually, Kaveh published a manifesto in an attempt to counter the Third Option. He wrote:

“The Third Option is only the first step in a long process of dehumanization - one that will first be applied to nonhuman persons, and then eventually to human persons….[Fearmongers are provoking] the anxieties of an already insecure populace not because they have any strategy regarding our survival as a civilization, but because they desire power. They don’t care about the cost, perhaps, because they don’t believe there truly is one.”

He noted that both civilizations, the human and the amygdaline, have “grown to embrace fear, and to fear change. . . . Single-minded fixation on controlling everything they encounter combined with their rejection of the unfamiliar has led to a cultural and technological stagnation…”

Kaveh compared the situation to Moby Dick: “‘That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate,’ says Ahab of the white whale with which he is so obsessed and yet by his own admission does not understand. ‘I will wreak that hate upon him.’”

At the end of the book, it seemed like January 6, 2021 had just happened, and it was impossible to say whether democracy would survive. The question remains debatable both in this universe and the fictional one. Thus, this book turned out to be much more depressing than I anticipated, since so much of what was going on in the alternate universe of the book echoed what is going on right now with many people in the US, much of which is indeed stuck in an alternate universe of its own. How very meta.

Evaluation: Highly recommended! But it is also recommended to read the first installment, “Axiom’s End,” before this one.

I was so intrigued by Axiom's End that I was anxiously awaiting Truth of the Divine. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy the sequel as much. The pace was slower, and although I know dealing with trauma is a gradual process, many aspects of the story felt repetitive. I'm still glad I read it, but I'm sorry to say that for me, Truth of the Divine was just... okay.

The book by Lindsay Ellis, “Truth of the Divine” is a very unusual offering. It is a science fiction novel claiming to be an alternate-history, first-contact tale. Perhaps my mind is just not geared to reading a type of novel that I don’t even know what the type means.

One person, Cora, is an intermediary/translator for humanity with this other worldly entity. The question is how to treat this non-human entity named Ampersand and what should be done about it.

Perhaps the idea was to consider how humans might treat a non-human alien, it did have some redeeming qualities there, but it was too outré for my taste in novels. No doubt some folks that might be more into fantasy will like this and to them I say enjoy. But from my perspective this was among the most boring of books I’ve read and a struggle to get through enough to do a review.

In this sequel to Axiom's End, Cora is still an interpreter for Ampersand as a new Amygdaline arrives on Earth and changes everything.

I can't wait for everyone to read the Sequel! It was just as great as the first book. The Sequel opens up the story to the public so I think the next book will be really interesting to see as well.


Spoilers

Cora is finally dealing with the after effects of her dynamic bond with Ampersand but she does make a new friend to help her along. A human friend, mind you. I think it's good for her but I would've liked more information as to why her mind and body were reacting that way. It didn't seem like it was just PTSD.

Nikolai is great, Enola is the villian 😂
Well I guess that's not fair but the introduction of the amygdalines self-medicating gives us this almost two personality, alien and I think as the book goes on it really makes the case for how similar the species is to humanity.

Is Sol a redeemable character? No. Enough said

Her father! Oh my God, the true villian of the story.

3.5 stars

A character-driven sequel that isn’t afraid to spend time addressing the trauma that has accumulated over the course of the series.

I found the first book took a while to get into. Truth of the Divine, however, picks up immediately, which is perfect for a sequel. However, it is overall more slow-paced than Axiom’s End, and the core of the story lies not in plot points and questions about what alien life wants from us, but rather more philosophical and personal questions, like “what is a person?” and how to navigate the interpersonal relationships between main characters Cora, Ampersand, Kaveh, and Nikola.

My main ‘complaint’ is that Cora and Ampersand’s relationship, so integral to the series’ overall arc and (in my opinion) the best part of Axiom’s End, was decentered in this novel. Ampersand hardly appears at all, except for at the beginning and end of the book. I understand thematically why this is the case: Cora, traumatized from the events of book one, is at her lowest point, and must invest in other characters while her relationship with Ampersand is strained. However, I look forward to seeing these two interacting more in the third book, hopefully learning how to function as a united partnership.

There’s something delightfully irreverent about the writing style, like it’s plucked out the best and juiciest parts of fanfic without compromising on telling an actual, compelling story about the nature of humanity and personhood.

While not quite as good as Axiom’s End, Truth of the Divine was a worthy sequel and a thoroughly enjoyable read. I am already looking forward to the third book in the series.