When You Had Power: Nothing is Promised Book 1

Susan Kaye Quinn

Apr 2022 · Nothing is Promised Book 1 · Spotify Audiobooks · Narrated by Maria Victoria Martinez

About this audiobook

For better, for worse. In sickness and in health.

It’s a legal vow of care for families in 2050, a world beset by waves of climate-driven plagues.

Power engineer Lucía Ramirez long ago lost her family to one—she’d give anything to take that vow. The Power Islands give humanity a fighting chance, but tending kelp farms and solar lilies is a lonely job. The housing AI found her a family match, saying she should fit right in with the Senegalese retraining expert who’s a force of nature, the ex-Pandemic Corps cook with his own cozy channel, and even the writer who insists everything is stories, all the way down. This family of literal and metaphorical refugees could be the shelter she’s seeking from her own personal storm.

She needs this one to work.

Then an unscheduled power outage and a missing turtle-bot crack open a mystery. Something isn’t right on Power Island One, but every step she takes to solve it, someone else gets there first—and they’re determined to make her unsee what she’s seen. Lucía is an engineer, not a detective, but fixing this problem might cost her the one thing she truly needs: a home.

When You Had Power is the first of four tightly-connected novels in a new hopepunk series. It’s about our future, how society will shift and flex like a solar lily in the storms of our own making, and how breaks in the social fabric have to be expected, tended to, and healed. Because we’re in this together, now more than ever before.

Ratings and reviews

This is the first novel in the Nothing Is Promised tetralogy by Susan Kaye Quinn, which should be read in order. I dislike the grimdark trend in speculative fiction, so I was excited to try this series of hopepunk, speculative fiction that focuses on connection, kindness, and optimism as resources in the fight for positive change. These four closely interconnected stories have an interesting dystopian setting in a future where our world has been ravaged by climate change and viruses. I enjoyed the author’s writing style and characterization. I also liked seeing the social and technological changes she envisions. The only thing that frustrated me was that the story felt too rushed. I love stories of found/chosen family, but the relationships developed very quickly when the characters didn’t actually have very much time to get to know each other. And while we get a partial answer to the mystery of the unscheduled power outages, you’ll have to keep reading the subsequent books to get the full answer. I enjoyed the narration by Maria Victoria Martinez. Her performance was well paced and easy to understand, and I liked how she conveyed personality and emotions with her character voices. If you enjoy tales of found family and engineers as heroes, or you’re interested in the hopepunk genre, then I would recommend this series. Also, I love how the gorgeous covers fit together. I purchased this ebook but was given a free copy of the audiobook by the author and volunteered to provide an honest review.