Genre: Young Adult Science Fiction/Adventure/Romance
Rating: 4.5/5
A vastly intriguing and interesting read, These Broken Stars is the first in trilogy by collaborative author team Amie Kaufman (Illuminae)and Meagan Spooner (Skylark).
This story has two perspective characters that (for the most part with an exception or two) alternate each chapter: Tarver Merendsen and Lilac LaRoux. Tarver is a soldier and esteemed war hero across the media, and Lilac is the daughter of the richest man in the galaxy. When the two meet on the luxury spaceliner, the Icarus, Tarver does not recognize the esteemed young woman for who she really is, and Lilac appreciates Tarver’s treatment of her as it is genuine and not based around her popularity through wealth. From experience, Lilac knows that a relationship with a soldier can never work out because of the views of her extremely powerful father, so she gives the man she loves the cold shoulder from the moment she meets him, and Tarver finds it ridiculous that he did not recognize who she was before making a fool of himself.
When the Icarus and its 50,000 passengers are being sucked out of hyperspace, socioeconomic status no longer has the same meaning. People scrounge for escape pods, and Tarver and Lilac end up in the same one, alone, together. With her hidden skills in electronics, Lilac is able to free their escape pod from the falling Icarus. The two crash-land on a planet that appears to be terraformed, a planet that people have introduced plants and animals to in order to colonize, but there are no people. Putting his fields skills to the test, Tarver aims to find the main crash site of the Icarus, where rescue crafts would be, and Lilac must give up the rich niceties of civilization in order to focus on survival. When they reach the crash site and no rescue craft are present, Tarver and Lilac find not only that they are the only survivors, but something eerie is going on with the planet.
The two must work together to find a way to survive long enough to get a distress signal out into space, but when Lilac begins having extremely strong hallucinations, Tarver is worried for her sanity and survival.
SPOILER SECTION
The most intriguing aspect of the novel is just more than halfway through, when the reader is presented with the dilemma that the characters are not having visions, per se, but are experiencing a dimensional anomaly. This intriguing aspect of the book almost took the realism away, but was still very interesting. The planet is hidden and owned by Lilac’s father, and the secret of the dimensional rift is huge. In the most simplistic of terms, her father’s company made contact with an intelligent life-form through the dimensional folds of space (like hyperspace). These lifeforms from another dimension could have been a threat to humanity (who knows) to the LaRoux company kept them sealed away, unable to go back to their own dimension, but unable to leave the planet.
These beings are vastly interesting in that they can manipulate energy and create solid objects from that energy and that they are also able to communicate through mind and memory. The thing that made me both like and dislike the conclusion of the novel was this: Lilac sacrificed herself to get Tarver into the building on the planet to make a distress call, and the alien beings brought her back as a physical lifeform, complete with all the memories Lilac had before, but not the same body, exactly. While I liked this aspect and it was also extremely creepy when the created Lilac looked at her own corpse, it was somewhat annoying as a way to cheat death. At the same time, it is an intriguing scientific aspect to the novel and makes me wonder what part the aliens or the recreated Lilac will play in future novels in the trilogy (with have different perspective characters than the first novel).
All-in-all, I would say YES, this book is a must-read for the young adult audience. Both characters are developed well and their relationship, as it blooms, is also intriguing. This is definitely heavy in the romance genre, but the science-fiction aspect is a good hook for anyone interested in extraterrestrial life or outer space, which is definitely one of the strong draws to this book. Definitely a book that is hard to put down, I will be pointing this one out to a number of people that I know!
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