I've tried reading this repeatedly and just can't get into it. I'm sure it's a fine book but I don't like reviewing books I haven't finished yet. Doesn't seem fair.

Above the average, original and entertaining space opera, with awesome story world, plot and characters!

This is an author to watch out for!

Braking Day is a sci-fi novel by Adam Oyebanji. It takes place across a small fleet of generation ships, as they come to the end of their journey. Soon, they're going to reach the point at which they beign to slow down ("Braking Day), and prepare to enter and colonise a new star system. But before they do, there are going to be some dark answers given to hard questions. Old mysteries are going to be dug up and dragged into the light. The survival of the society on the ships, indeed the survival of the ships themselves, may hang in the balance.
And the feather tipping that balance is a young man who just wants to be left alone, left to do his job in peace, to maybe get a promotion, to maybe change things a little. He may get rather more than he's bargained for.

All of that sounded rather portentuous, so to save you a longer read, the tl;dr is that Braking Day is a fun, snappy sci-fi yarn. It builds out a believable inter-generational society for its ships, one which has genuine problems baked in, but isn't a theocracy or raving anarchy. It shows us young, smart people trying to do the right thing, and older, debatably as smart people whose perspective on what the right thing is may differ. It explores social class and asks questions about wha we choose to remember and to forget.But in etween the big questions it has a fast-paced action adventure story going on, with a delightful soupcon of mystery about it.

Our protagonist is Ravi Macleod, an officer candidate on one of the ships, and from a family that are very much the wrong side of the tracks. He suffers from discrimination on one side, and from disappointment on the other. His fellow students think he's a criminal, and his family aren't entirely sure he's not becoming just another member of the elite looking to put them down. Ravi, through it all, is thoughtful, conscientious, and perhaps a little prone to being led by his emotions. He carries his flaws well, though, and the story gives him the chance to be articulate and likable. If I was occasionally driven to a shake of the head at a moment of naivete, still it was possible to feel an honest joy in those moments as well, to see someone reaching out for the better option, rather than the least worst. Ravi is an excellent portrayal of a young man stepping out onto unsure footing, looking to find something of himself between the metal walls that he calls home. And he's helped by a rather fun ensemble cast. Honestly, I wanted to see more of all of them, but a shout out in particular to his cousin Boz, a young woman with a word-weary attitude decades odler than she is, but with the fire and ideals to try and make change and break things whe needed. She's an excellent foil for Ravi, and their interplay of outlooks was always a genuine delight.

They exist on one of three generation ships, creaking, much repaired vessels sailing the wine-dark sea of space. Those craft have seen their shar eof triumphs and tragedies etched inot their skins, and we see a lot of references to their history, both implicit and explicit. it's a credit to the author that the Archimedes, Ravi's ship, feels like a real, lived in space. From its battered duct-work to lost compartments, from the engineering core buried levels deep to the bar-slash movie theatre the kids go to, the environment has a humanity to it, an energy which says that this is a real space. Some of that is georpahy played out as politics, too; the tensions between a class of semi-hereditary officers and those beneath them is often palpable. Those at the bottom of the ladder are a few bad choices form being stuffed into the recycler as biomass. The ships feel their age, feel like decisions have been made there, catastrophes and triumphs all - and the socity they've built feels human too. Laced through with flaws, open to corruption, someimes driven by poor or terrible choices, but in the end, something built by people trying to do their best, trying to survive.

And the story. Ah, well, no spoilers. But this one went places I didn't expect from the jump. It's one part mystery, one part coming of age tale, one part adventure epic - and you know what, all of those parts are rather good. Importantly, it asks big questions, human questions, which will make you think - but it asks them while you're having so much fun following along that you may ot notice for a little bit.

In summary, it's a fun story, with interesting things to say, with solid characterisation in a well-drawn world. That makes it a solid purchase, if you're in need of a generation ship mystery (and who isn't?!).

This dystopian novel grabs you with its future imaginative thinking, its smart young heroes and heroines, as well as plot twists you don’t see coming. Three ships have set out from Earth to space in an over-century trek to a planet that seems likely to be able to sustain human life. They’ve left in frustration in seeing AI taking over human free will, and vow to have no AI aboard their ships. Instead, they rely on biotech enhancements that enable them to directly access the onboard computers and communicate with each other. As they approach the new planet and what has been dubbed “Braking Day” to slow the ships into that planet’s orbit, all sorts of ideological factions have broken out. There’s the imperious officer class and resentful crew they order around, many of the latter who want all social structures disbanded planet-side. There’s those who having grown up in space dread the prospect of being stranded on one planet. And there’s a rebellion group who has started terrorist actions to prevent Braking Day as they do not want humanity destroying whatever life already exists there.

In the meantime, ship engineer in training Ravi MacLeod has been seeing a girl who seems more of a ghost and that has him questioning his sanity. This girl harkens both mystery and danger, as Ravi and his brilliant, rebellious cousin Boz try to figure out what’s going on. And what’s going on makes for seismic revelations.

Thanks to Netgalley for an advanced reader’s copy.

An adventure after generations in Space it is finally time to stop and turn to their destination. No one on board has any idea what they might find on their new home or if they will survive but they have made it this far. Ravi MacLeod is an engineer in training , hoping to elevate his families status with his new job. however he begins to see a girl on the outside of the ship where she cannot possibly be since she doesn't have on a space suit. Does he try to find out what's going on or does he continue his work to assure his promotion. A wonderful space opera, well thought out and surprising. It was an enjoyable read.

Braking Day is the debut novel by author Adam Oyebanji. Braking Day with a self-contained plot that has the potential for spinoffs set in the same world. The novel explores the role of AI and its potential pitfalls in human lives, as well as multiple complex viewpoints on its applications. Braking Day examines the possibilities of near-future space travel and what communities aboard these generation ships would look like. On board the generation ship Archimedes bound for a distant star, engineer-in-training Ravinder (Ravi) Macleod must discover the secrets at the heart of the voyage in this new sci-fi novel.

It's been 132 years since three generation ships (Archimedes, Bohr, Chandrasekhar) escaped an Earth dominated by artificial intelligence (*LOKI - Loosely Organized Kinetic Intelligence) in pursuit of a life on a distant planet orbiting Tau Ceti. Now, it’s nearly Braking Day, when the ships will begin their long-awaited descent to their new home. Born on the lower decks of the Archimedes, Ravi is an engineer-in-training, set to be the first of his family to become an officer in the stratified hierarchy aboard the ship.

All crew members and passengers have a rating. “Dead weight” gets recycled because they cannot afford to waste resources on people who are disruptive or not contributing. Ravi’s father, the descendant of blue-collar workers, was a petty criminal by Earth’s standards, but was a problem to the wrong people. He was recycled and even though Ravi is an excellent student, he carries that stigma. People who reach 75 are also considered dead weight. While on a routine inspection, Ravi's life gets weird when he sees a young blonde woman floating outside an airlock without a spacesuit.

She seems alive, and Ravi understandably worried since he’s the only one who can see her and worries that he is having a mental breakdown. And As his visions of the girl grow more frequent, Ravi is faced with a choice: secure his family’s place among the elite members of Archimedes’ crew or risk it all by pursuing the mystery of the floating girl. Is this sabotage by the BonVoyers—a protest group that doesn’t want the fleet to colonize an alien world, extirpating its indigenous life?

With the help of his cousin, Boz, and her illegally constructed AI, Ravi must investigate the source of these strange visions and uncovers the truth of the Archimedes’ departure from Earth before Braking Day arrives and changes everything about life as they know it. Boz is, however, a quintessential Macleod, a bad girl with fingers in many dodgy pies and who has herself come within a whisker of being declared Dead Weight. She, too, may well have her own plans for the future. But the truth is stranger than that, and the Archimedes is in more peril than he knows.

While this is a standalone, I would like to see another book in this world. I would like to see what happens next as Braking Day arrives. I would like to see what is happening on the other ships as well since they are mostly in the background. I think that this book does a good job in what makes a human, human, and what AI does to a person. As Ravi meets the mysterious woman and her origins, the story gets a bit more interesting.

Braking Day by Adam Oyebanji is a pretty fast read and doesn't bog down with a ton of scientific jargon that can sometimes drag the storyline in my opinion.
The story is about Ravi, an engineer in training, that starts having headaches and visions of a girl in a place he's never been before. His cousin Boz is a hacker who is always inches away from getting "mulched", their term for getting recycled/executed.. Together they start piecing together the mystery of his visions and the conspiracies that are floating around the ship. Not sure if there are going to be more books following this one but this book does well on it's own. Overall a good read for science fiction fans.

Braking Day by Adam Oyebanji, is by far my favorite book of the year. From the setting in space and descriptions of three, (or are there more?), habitat ships and the people living on them, I was swept into the story. The inner workings of the ships and the way the inhabitants live and work are laid out in amazing detail I only hope there is more to come from Ravi, Boz and Lisette.

Something about the description of this book made me give it a chance even though I’ve been turned off generation ship stories lately. Perhaps it was the fact that the story is confined to a single generation, rather than attempting to span the multiple generations of the ship’s journey. Adam Oyebanji uses the setting to tell an interesting story of political intrigue and cover-ups, mystery, and some intense action. While there are parts that don’t quite cohere into the whole, overall, it’s a pretty good yarn.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC.

Braking Day takes place just as the Archimedes and its two sister ships near their destination of Tau Ceti. Ravinder (Ravi) Macleod is training to be an engineering officer, but his family name is already a strike against him. While dealing with this prejudice, Ravi also starts to notice that not all is right with the Archimedes. Certain things don’t add up—but why? Is this sabotage by the BonVoyers—a protest group that doesn’t want the fleet to colonize an alien world, extirpating its indigenous life? Or is there something even more sinister afoot, something that has perhaps been hidden from Ravi and the rest of his generation?

I can’t go into too many details here without immediately getting into spoiler territory. Suffice it to say, I predicted the twist that happens halfway through the novel, and the final reveal was a little disappointing. Nevertheless, I appreciate how Oyebanji takes the time to construct credible, competing belief systems stemming from the history on Earth—namely, how some people embraced implants (hence becoming cyborgs) while rejecting artificial intelligences, and others did the opposite. Everything that happens, and the cold war situation that drives the largest conflict of this story, makes sense from a narrative perspective, and I appreciate that.

I also liked that Oyebanji took the time to discuss the ethics around humanity spreading out among the stars. Do we have the right to displace indigenous life on another world simply so we can colonize it and make our mark? The fact that there are different perspectives on this from characters in the novel allows the reader to grapple with the complexity. While there is a twinge of dystopia here—Ravi is often struggling to afford the water rations to do things like shower, and it’s clear that the closed-loop system of the fleet is nearing its end of life—this novel is ultimately optimistic about the chances of a generation ship succeeding in its journey. I love how Oyebanji portrays the society that has sprung up on these three vessels, along with Ravi’s critiques of it.

Despite my disappointment with some parts of the reveal, I don’t want to be too harsh, because Braking Day kept me reading. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I couldn’t put it down. Nevertheless, I really wanted to find out the solutions to the various mysteries that Ravi had started to unravel.

On that note, without spoiling, let me praise this book for wrapping up those mysteries by the end. This could easily be the start of a series, but if it is not, it works fine as a standalone novel as well. There are enough dangling plot threads to start a new story—either with the same characters or perhaps their descendants—but the questions raised in this book get answered. This is a delicate balance to achieve, and Oyebanji nails it.

Overall, I would characterize this novel as fun, fraught with danger, and fulfilling in its promises to the reader.

Braking Day, thoughtful debut offering by Adam Oyebanji, begins in the sixth generation of a seven-generation trip through space. The seventh generation are currently infants and toddlers. For genealogical purposes, a generation is typically defined as twenty years. That means that it’s been over 120 years since three massive ships left Earth to colonize a planet orbiting the star Tau Ceti, traveling at roughly ten-percent of the speed of light. By necessity, travel time would be extended to include time to accelerate and time to decelerate. The title Braking Day refers to the moment, or “sol” since days aren’t really a thing in deep space, when the ships will start the yearlong deceleration process prior to reaching their destination. The ships will then be broken down into resources to create new cities for their new lives. There is no going back.

The ancestors of the current crew had a dream for their mission, to escape the oppression of “LOKI’s,” an anacronym for Loosely Organized Kinetic Intelligence. As mankind became more and more dependent on technology, artificial intelligence gained more and more power. Somewhere between The Matrix and I, Robot, LOKI’s have become mankind’s babysitters, determining which activities have acceptable levels of risk and which do not. They effectively run the world. First crew wanted to make their own choices and for their children to also have that right.

Main character Ravi McCleod is an engineer in-training. His life is marked by a depth of thought on Oyebanji’s part which surprised me. It would have been easy to make these self-maintaining ships given the level of technology represented on Earth when they were built, but by leaving the LOKI’s behind, they require maintenance, repairs, experience the wear of decades of travel, even some catastrophes that cannot ever be repaired. Resources and water are limited. No one living even remembers Earth or “First Crew.” Their society has evolved to adapt to space living. Not everyone wants to give that up to live a stationary life on a rock and not everyone is productive. All crew members and passengers have a rating. “Dead weight” gets recycled because they cannot afford to waste resources on people who are disruptive or not contributing. Ravi’s father, the descendant of blue-collar workers, was a petty criminal by Earth’s standards, but was a problem to the wrong people. He was recycled and even though Ravi is an excellent student, he carries that stigma.

Despite whatever their intentions were when they left Earth, the first crew brought their prejudice and bad habits with them. Those descended from the revered officers of first crew have advantage, easy access to education, and opportunities. Those descended from blue-collar workers like janitors, warehouse workers, and food service, are barely scraping by. There are days that Ravi has to decide if he can afford to buy water to shower after dirty days crawling around the bowels of the ship. His professors doubt his intelligence and openly call his integrity into question in front of other students. No one even questions this prejudice.

Oyebanji crafts a believable world, not just with classism and environment, but has thought about life on these ships down to swear words, inter-ship sports teams, traditions, holidays, and the things people would organize to protest about six generations into the voyage. This believability makes what happens to Ravi so notable—he sees a girl floating outside the ship in the hard vacuum of space with no suit. A complete and total impossibility. We struggle with him while he evaluates his own sanity and enlists the help of his cousin, brilliant and gifted at coding, someone who should be in the upper echelons of the crew, but who keeps getting her rating knocked down for proudly following the family tradition of misdemeanor crimes.

The adventure that follows in the last third of the book is excellent. The reader does not see it coming even though the clues are there and that’s just fun. I truly hope that Oyebanji will make this a series. Braking Day is a complete book with a solid ending, but there is so much material to be explored that I would definitely be interested to see which way he takes these characters after their experiences.

My Rating: A- Enjoyed A Lot

I quite enjoyed Breaking Day! We're introduced to Ravi, who is living on a generation ship that has almost reached its destination, after more than a hundred years. Things have been far from easy for the generations of people who have migrated from Earth in the hopes that their descendants will one day reach a new planet. So people are getting pretty excited to finally be about to get off the ship- for the first time in their whole lives.

But Ravi starts seeing things that he should not be seeing. And as he delves deeper, he starts to figure out that there are way more secrets on this ship than he ever imagined. Obviously, there are some pretty big time constraints to figuring out what is happening, and that helped to keep the action coming. But I also really loved learning about the characters, too. There were a ton of lighthearted moments, and funny banter among the characters which helped the story feel very readable.

I will say, there are some parts in the middle that did lag a bit for me. Perhaps a few things could have been pared down, but overall, I really enjoyed the story. There's a ton of great commentary about humanity as a whole, and how no matter where/when we are, we seem to keep making the same mistakes. It's really thought-provoking. I also was really invested in finding out what the secrets the ships were hiding, and finding out more about what drove them from Earth, and to parts unknown.

Bottom Line: Enjoyable characters, a great space mystery, and some great commentary far outweigh the bit of a mid-book lull.

Engineer-in-training Ravi MacLeod has long set his sights on becoming an officer aboard the generation ship Archimedes. It’s been over a century since the Archimedes and it’s two sister ships left an AI dominated earth for a new start on a distant world. The Archimedes is preparing for Braking Day, when the generation ship finally begins to slow down as they approach their destination star. Only Ravi’s started seeing a woman no one else can see, one who can’t possibly exist, and to top it off odd things have started happening around the ship. As his visions become more frequent, Ravi must decide between securing his dream position or pursuing the mystery his visions reveal.

Adam Oyebanji’s Braking Day is a diverse, inventive story which breaths exciting new life into the genre mainstay of the generation ship. With vibrant world-building, well crafted characters, and a twisty mystery driven plot, Braking Day is a stand out novel from a wonderful new voice in science fiction.

I do love a fun debut! Space is not a human friendly place to be but the little group of generation ships has almost made it to their destination world when unexplained things start happening. The protagonist is a crew caste member of the fleet that’s managed to get into officer training. The setting is suitably desperate. The ships are breaking down, water is strictly rationed, some crimes are punishable by death and being made into mulch and well… nobody needs to worry about dying of old age on the ships…. But the first reports are coming in from the target world. The gravity is good so anything else should be survivable, with domes if need be, there is liquid water so the temperature range should be ok too. But stuck in deep space on ships with a year to go does not keep you at all,safe from other humans being stupid.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Ravi is an engineer-in-training and a descendent of the people who boarded three enormous generation ships to escape a rogue AI that was hell bent on destroying humanity on earth. They are nearing the end of the trip when Ravi must venture down into the ship, but he sees something he absolutely does not expect; a woman is floating in the vacuum of space– and she is helmetless!

This starts off as a rather dark book. The people on the ship are oppressed, they live day to day and have to spend the water they earn to live and add on top of that, the fact that you can be recycled if you make the wrong person mad.

The story has a lot of fun little nuance. The ‘space curses’ are not your typical swearing in English that one would expect and the ‘world’ feels very lived in. After five generations aboard the same ship, it very well should be. The idea that certain sections of the ship are different countries is an interesting bit of flavor. Some of them are better off than others and they generally don’t seem to reflect on the countries of today.

The ending of this book was not at all what I was expecting. It kept me on my toes and had me questioning everything with each new reveal. If you want to stay engaged with a book, this is the one for you!

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoyed The Expanse series by James A. S. Corey or The Martian by Andy Weir.

This is such a good book! Would recommend for sci fi fans

Summary: it's almost time for a fleet of space ships to finally make the approach to the new homeworld. Ravi is a trainee engineer who, while doing maintenance, sees a woman outside the station, without a suit. He's still got his job to do but he starts pulling apart the mystery of that girl and the whole past of society.

I love sci Fi & I've read a bunch of generation ship type books and this is a different take on it then I usually see! Usually something has gone Very Wrong and someone has to fix it, but this time things seem Pretty Alright except Ravi can't leave it alone. And that's fun! In the middle of his job he's got to figure out why he's seeing this girl, what's going on with the ships, and help his cousin stay out of trouble. Truly a delight.

It digs into classism and roles in society and countercultures and the sins of the past, but it's a delightful adventure the whole way through. Wherever I thought we were going when it was a third of the way through, it turned out very different and so much more fun.

Overall, definitely recommended.

Thank you to NetGalley and DAW Books for the review copy provided in exchange for an honest review

An immersive and fast-paced story, Adam Oyebanji's debut is a rollercoaster ride from start to finish. Any fan of sci-fi will love the care and dedication Oyebanji's taken with his world-building, but it remains accessible for readers just dipping their toes into the genre's waters.