Title: Starflight (Starflight #1)
Author: Melissa Landers
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Release Date: February 2nd, 2016
Standalone/Series: Companion to Starfall, out 2017
Genre: Fantasy – Sci-Fi – Young Adult
Goodreads link
My rating in stars: 3 stars
My rating in words: It was okay.
What it’s about:
Life in the outer realm is a lawless, dirty, hard existence, and Solara Brooks is hungry for it. Just out of the orphanage, she needs a fresh start in a place where nobody cares about the engine grease beneath her fingernails or the felony tattoos across her knuckles. She’s so desperate to reach the realm that she’s willing to indenture herself to Doran Spaulding, the rich and popular quarterback who made her life miserable all through high school, in exchange for passage aboard the spaceliner Zenith.
When a twist of fate lands them instead on the Banshee, a vessel of dubious repute, Doran learns he’s been framed on Earth for conspiracy. As he pursues a set of mysterious coordinates rumored to hold the key to clearing his name, he and Solara must get past their enmity to work together and evade those out for their arrest. Life on the Banshee may be tumultuous, but as Solara and Doran are forced to question everything they once believed about their world—and each other—the ship becomes home, and the eccentric crew family. But what Solara and Doran discover on the mysterious Planet X has the power to not only alter their lives, but the existence of everyone in the universe…
My thoughts:
This was a fun, quick, easy-to-read sci fi romance that was light on the science and heavy on the romance. The story itself is super entertaining (of course it is, there are space pirates) and is a real pageturner. It is super easy to read and will be over before you know it. The characters are cute and their banter was funny.
What drew me to this story was mostly the promise of these characters and their relationships. I love the trope of eccentric characters being thrown together, having adventures and becoming a family and that was definitely a huge part of this book.
However, it all felt a bit lacking for me. Maybe my expectations were a bit too high, but I feel there should have been more to this story. More time to develop the characters. More time to develop their relationships. More time to make you really care about each and every one of them. More time to develop the romance. More time for the crew to have epic space adventures together. More time to develop the world. More time to set up the plot twist ending.
As it was, it all felt a bit rushed and I could not get fully into this. I could not quite believe in the character development. I could not fully believe in the relationships, as it all just happened too fast. The romance was cute and sweet, but predictable while it should have been epic. And I thought the ending could have been better explained. I just needed a bit more time as a reader to be convinced, and I did not get this.
That said, I did enjoy this book and I will pick up the companion book Starfall when it comes out. Perhaps that will provide that little something extra that I was still missing here.
Favorite quotes:
“Family. She hadn’t realized it until now, but that’s what the people on this ship were to her. At some point during this haphazard journey, she’d fallen in love with a bespectacled kleptomaniac, a star-crossed seducer and his displaced princess, and most of all, an infuriating blue blood who used to call her Rattail. She’d learned that home was a fluid thing, and whether on a planet, on a satellite, or on a rusted bucket of a ship, this crew was her home.”
“She had no idea what the future would hold for any of them, beyond possibilities as infinite as the stars. And really, that was enough.”