Book Review #64: Torsion by Sera Amoroso

Hello Dear Reader!

Welcome to another indie book review by the amazing Sera Amoroso! She’s a street team member of mine who’s super passionate and fun to talk to, so if you’ve got a minute, check her out on Instagram @seraamoroso.

Torsion, Book 1 of the Makria Cycle, follows the story of Nine students as they are invited to attend Torsion University, a prestigious and mysterious school known for its technological advances. As soon as they arrive, they start to suspect the school is hiding its own secrets, and what they discover is much more than what they could ever imagine. With their lives on the line, they work together to stop the dark secret behind the school’s existence.

But before I get deeper into that, here’s the back-cover summary (from Goodreads):

Torsion (noun). the state of being twisted.

Nine students are invited to attend Torsion University, a prestigious, and mysterious school, known for its technological advances. Every person has something to hide, and every person has something to lose. Little do they know that the school's shiny reputation is hiding a secret as well, one that will make or break them. As they work to unravel the web the school has created, they have a choice: Solve the mystery or die trying.

Time for the review!

As mentioned in the back-cover summary, there are nine main characters this book keeps track of: Henry, Nasra, Elena, Zola, Katya, Aiken, Mary, Alyssa, and Astra. Though it was a bit hard for me personally to keep track of these characters, I did find them to be wonderfully diverse in both personality and interests. Of the nine, my personal favorite were Katya, Aiken, and Astra. They were also just the most memorable to me personally.

Surrounding this wonderful cast of main characters are their lovely classmates, their not-so-lovely classmates, their suspicious old man of a dean, and various family members introduced throughout the story. Each character introduced helps build more layers into the main group of nine, giving them purpose to the story other than the fact they simply exist in the world.

And speaking of the world, the main setting of this book is Torsion, the prestigious and mysterious university known for its highly intellectual students and advances in technology. With a relatively small student population of a few thousand, I’d like to think of this place of futuristic Hogwarts, mainly because of the numerous secret rooms and passageways that are scattered throughout the layout of the university building.

Overall, I enjoyed reading this book; however, there were a few things that pulled me out of my reading experience. There were small errors scattered throughout the book that grew in number the closer I got to the end that pulled me out of scenes I felt were supposed to hit me harder than others. At first, I also became confused on who said what or did what, and found certain scenes a bit difficult to follow. Also, while I did grow to love all the characters, I found it difficult to distinguish some from others. I feel like I never got to visualize them well, and I wish I had more time to get to know them so certain scenes hit me harder than they did. This particular part of the story, surrounding the characters’ development felt rushed to me. Switching from one character to the other was also a bit abrupt throughout the book.

Despite my above criticisms, I did enjoy this book and the twists and turns it had. I didn’t expect Astra to have the background she did, I definitely didn’t expect certain characters to have the… endings they received, and I definitely wasn’t expecting Aiken to go through something as awful as he did.

So, Torsion rating:

3.5/5 and recommend if you like a bigger group of main characters, a plot full of twists and turns, and futuristic, sci-fi technology!

Thanks for reading!