Book Review // These Broken Stars

“Luxury spaceliner Icarus suddenly plummets from hyperspace into the nearest planet. Lilac LaRoux and Tarver Merendsen survive – alone. Lilac is the daughter of the richest man in the universe. Tarver comes from nothing, a cynical war hero. Both journey across the eerie deserted terrain for help. Everything changes when they uncover the truth.”

GOODREADS // BARNES & NOBLE

This book is a pile of clichés heaped on top of another pile of clichés.

Maybe it’s because YA sci-fi and YA romance aren’t really my thing (and this combined both of them) or because I’ve read too many YA sci-fi/romance books for my own good, but this book was downright predictable. Let’s see how many clichés we can find:

tough boy from low-class world loves beautiful girl from high-class world
said beautiful girl doesn’t know she’s absolutely beeeaaaaauuuutiiiiifuulllll
they like each other but they can’t say it
also, forbidden romance
stranded on a planet with no one but themselves, they are forced to confess their lurrrrve for each other

I think there’s more but really, if I list them all, this whole post will just be a collection of all the clichés present in this book.

Also, is the plot of every Amie Kaufman book the same?

Maybe it’s just me, but I just read Illuminae (also YA sci-fi/romance coauthored by Amie Kaufman) and somehow the plots were carbon copies of each other. Okay, maybe not the exact same, because admittedly, I liked Illuminae a lot better than I liked this one, but we have:

spaceship malfunction
overbearing, larger-than-life parent figure
families as motivation for the end to the crisis
crisis forces two teenagers to confront their feelings about each other
interview transcripts of the event in question
corporation performing questionable activities in outerspace
terraforming

But I mean, even if they all are quite similar, that woman can write a fishy-corporation-with-overbearing-parent-and-spaceship-malfunction story quite well.

Also the writing… was a bit flowery.

A lot of people think the writing is absolutely beautiful, so this is probably just me, but I thought the writing was a bit overdone. It was compelling, but sometimes I felt it was trying too hard to be beautiful and it didn’t explicitly state a lot of the actions that the characters took that were important to the story, but rather left you to assume that the characters had successfully or unsuccessfully reached a goal based on other descriptions.

The plot was AMAZING, but it didn’t make much sense.

Like I said before: Amie Kaufman. There’s a GAPING plot hole at the end. Like, MASSIVE. And while I believe in suspension of disbelief, to an extent, when I’m reading, you can’t have a plot hole that big and have a book that makes sense. Maybe it’s because I do like non-YA-romance sci-fi, like Ender’s Game, but I thought that the end could use a bit more of an explanation. From what I understand, the trilogy focuses on three different groups of people, so I’m really not expecting to find my answers in the next book, or ever.

I think I can safely conclude that YA sci-fi/romance is not my thing. Perhaps you’ll like this book if YA sci-fi/romance is your thing.

I’ll probably read the next book, just because Amie Kaufman does write some amazing plots and I haven’t read Gemina (the sequel to Illuminae) yet, so I think the overarching storyline will be harder to guess. There are a TON of amazing people who love this book. Me? It just wasn’t my cup of tea.