Author: Ren Hutchings
Published: 2025
Target audience: Adults (appropriate 14+)
Mysteries, memory loss, and intergalactic plots - it’s Anastasia the movie in space! ‘An Unbreakable World’ revolves around Page, an amnesiac pickpocket who is captured by one of her marks and dragged into a high stakes scheme. Her kidnappers - arrogant Zhak and secretive mercenary Maelle - plan to pass Page off as a monk from an isolated planet to help them infiltrate a treasure-filled spaceship. If successful, Page will finally be able to escape poverty and investigate the secrets of her past.
This book presents a fascinating literary ecosystem of varying socio-political forces and the affected ordinary people in an expansive sci-fi setting. It made me genuinely interested for the author’s first book ‘Under Fortunate Stars’ - with ‘An Unbreakable World’ serving as a standalone spin-off. However, despite its fascinating world-building and fun space opera premise, ‘An Unbreakable World’ falls short with a disappointing bait-and switch, disconnected narrative elements, and a passive protagonist.
The novel starts strong with thievery, kidnapping, and the question of Page’s missing memories. This momentum will have readers hooked and eager for a space heist adventure, only for the pacing to immediately stagnate. Instead of “the heist of a lifetime”, the author appears more interested in exploring the mythology and socio-political connective tissue of her literary universe rather than actually telling the story audiences were promised. Chapters meander between Page’s point-of-view in the present, Maelle in the present, and Dalya in the past, along with excerpts of in-universe scholarly articles, traditional folk-tales, communication logs, and an interview transcript from the enigmatic Storyteller. While these perspectives reveal interesting lore and character backstory, they lack a sense of rising tension or narrative progression. Even three quarters of the way through the book, it still felt like the plot hadn’t started. This may leave readers feeling disgruntled, like they’ve been hit with a bait-and-switch.
These side snippets create compelling subplots, yet are markedly disconnected from the main plot. Any new information presented is conveyed to just the reader, though occasionally the same information is reintroduced for the characters’ benefit, creating repetition and adding to the page count. Worse, it doesn’t actually change anything about present events or have any consequential effect on Page or Maelle. One could even argue that neither protagonist has a notable character arc.
As a protagonist, Page is largely passive. She does not need to uncover mysterious events, figure out the secrets of her past, or even learn historical details to successfully pass as a monk and gain entry to the target ship. Her one active decision at the beginning of the book when she tries to pickpocket Zhak is later undermined when it’s revealed that Zhak and Maelle deliberately lured Page in to capture her. If that hadn’t worked, they were simply going to buy Page’s contract from her boss and blackmail her into working for them. Page has little agency and minimal contribution in her own book, and largely just follows people around for most of the story, watching and reacting. Out of all the engrossing side stories that form a fascinating interweaving backdrop of intergalactic wars, aliens, religious cults, childhood friendships, space pirates, fraught families, rebellion, and betrayal, why must the main plot and main protagonist be the least compelling?
There is a great reveal at the end of the novel that I didn’t see coming, and genuinely made me sit up in surprise. Story-wise, however, this reveal altered nothing and had no emotional effect on the characters. This reveal was for the reader only.
‘An Unbreakable World’ is difficult to review as it is an intriguing story, yet also deeply flawed. Overall, I did enjoy this book, but once the narrative momentum plateaued after the first few chapters, I had to really push myself to keep reading. While I’m unlikely to revisit ‘An Unbreakable World’, I am certainly curious to check out ‘Under Fortunate Stars’ - the author’s first standalone book in her Union Quadrant universe.
