#amykaufman

This morning, Kady thought breaking up with Ezra was the hardest thing she’d have to do. This afternoon, her planet was invaded. The year is 2575, and two rival megacorporations are at war over a planet that’s little more than an ice-covered speck at the edge of the universe. Too bad nobody thought to warn the people living on it. With enemy fire raining down on them, Kady and Ezra—who are barely even talking to each other—are forced to fight their way onto an evacuating fleet, with an enemy warship in hot pursuit. But their problems are just getting started. A deadly plague has broken out and is mutating, with terrifying results; the fleet's AI, which should be protecting them, may actually be their enemy; and nobody in charge will say what’s really going on. As Kady hacks into a tangled web of data to find the truth, it's clear only one person can help her bring it all to light: the ex-boyfriend she swore she'd never speak to again. BRIEFING NOTE: Told through a fascinating dossier of hacked documents—including emails, schematics, military files, IMs, medical reports, interviews, and more—Illuminae is the first book in a heart-stopping, high-octane trilogy about lives interrupted, the price of truth, and the courage of everyday heroes.

If you think any of this sounds familiar I assure you, it doesn’t. I never read anything that was written this way. The story is told through several mediums from reports, to schematics to illustrations and many more crazy ways that will make you rotate the book 180º degrees, learn to read maps of space shifts and just let your eyes dance through the pages, the very placement of the sentences in the page being as important to the story as the sentences themselves. I screamed at the deaths, laughed at the sarcasm and was not able to reign my heart in throughout this crazy amazing story. This is almost a graphic novel in how artistic it is in its illustrations. One of the things I loved the most were the small references inside the book (like a medical file whose patient was Laini Taylor, like in the Daughter of Snoke and Bone author who shares some physical attributes with the main character.) If you like amazingly smart and funny characters, heart-stopping plot twists, science fiction, murderous IAs, space ships or hackers you can find them in this book along with so much more.

About midway through her journey with Juan Pablo Galavis, producers started

pushing Clare Crawley to tell him she loved him. At the time, she hadn’t said “I love you” to anyone in 10 years. The producers were like, “You have to say it, you have to say it, you might go home.” They would very much encourage it. It was like, “Are you going to regret not saying it? This could be the last moment you have with him. Don’t you want him to know how you feel? What if this determines if you go home or not?” Crawley came to a “happy medium” with the team, agreeing to tell Galavis that she was falling for him, but never saying “I love you.”

Brooks Forester- who eventually left Desiree Siegfried’s season because he wasn’t in love with her- had a similar experience. In the days before he quit the show, he said, nearly all of his ITMs were centered around getting him to say he loved her, and the producers were quick to remind him that he was the only one of the three remaining men who hadn’t uttered the words.

“There is no ‘What if I don’t propose’ option. It’s just ‘Here’s the ring. Go give it to her.’ That’s how they make it,” a Bachelor explained. “When you’re 25 and you’re a baby and you’re in a foreign place and are still hungover from the day before, they’re in your head. They make you do what they want you to do. They give you a hundred reasons why it’s a good idea and they just make it happen.”

Because there are no producers physically around, it can feel like “Mom and Dad are gone,” as Lowe put it. Contestants begin to unveil their truly authentic selves, finally given the opportunity to ask all the questions they’ve been holding in. Sometimes, the inquiries are mundane: “What do you do all day? Where the hell do they keep you?” Or they’re the kind of thing you wouldn’t want to ask in front of a producer: “Why did you get that tattoo? Do you really want 5 kids?”

“You may not be here next week, so are you gonna fucking hate me forever if we do this?” Flajnik said he asked the women he brought on his Fantasy Suite dates. “I very much left the ball in their court, because I totally understood the position they were all in.”

One day, a Bachelor producer asked “Rated R” Region if he’d be interested in spending a little extra time with Fedatowsky: “Let’s sat we let you leave the house and you walk to her house. Is this something you’d be open to?” Even though he was on crutches at the time- which would obviously make walking a challenge- Region responses that it would be “dope” to see more of the Bachelorette. So Gale revealed his plan.

While Fedatowsky’s residence was just up the street, Rego was driven 45 minutes away to a curvy, cliff side road. There, he was told to get out and hobble down the street on his crutches as the cameras rolled. The scene would later be used to make it look like Rego had gone to extreme lengths to see his love interest. But in fact, he was chauffeured over to her place later in the day.