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These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs
Jun. 30th, 2024 01:47 pmThese Burning Stars
4/5. Scifi about – um. Well. An intricate and vicious cat-and-mouse game between a ruthless operative and a shadowy former student she scorned, with a cleric caught in the middle, against the backdrop of a wildly complex political situation and a recently colonized and devastated minority population. That is not a good summary of what this book is, but here we are.
This puts the opera in space opera. It kind of reminds me of the Lymond books, actually? In a way where I can’t point to any one thing, and yet, there it is. Also Killing Eve, if you want a completely different comp. This is twisty and full of tricks and fuckery in the best way. It withholds vital information by mechanism of the forward and back time structure, which I usually think is cheap, but here worked perfectly.
And on the topic of things I liked about this book even though I shouldn’t have – it pushed me to the brink of my endurance for nasty characters doing nasty things, then yanked the rug out from under me at just the right moment. I think I would have liked this far far less if the entire central cast weren’t women or nonbinary people. If they were all men, their violence and vengeance would have been tiresome. As it is, they were vital and alive and, occasionally, disturbingly erotic.
I do have some concern about what the next book will be doing. It’s going to have to be something very different, given the reveals here. But I’m on board for it.
Content notes: Violence, references to sexual exploitation of minors, genocide.
4/5. Scifi about – um. Well. An intricate and vicious cat-and-mouse game between a ruthless operative and a shadowy former student she scorned, with a cleric caught in the middle, against the backdrop of a wildly complex political situation and a recently colonized and devastated minority population. That is not a good summary of what this book is, but here we are.
This puts the opera in space opera. It kind of reminds me of the Lymond books, actually? In a way where I can’t point to any one thing, and yet, there it is. Also Killing Eve, if you want a completely different comp. This is twisty and full of tricks and fuckery in the best way. It withholds vital information by mechanism of the forward and back time structure, which I usually think is cheap, but here worked perfectly.
And on the topic of things I liked about this book even though I shouldn’t have – it pushed me to the brink of my endurance for nasty characters doing nasty things, then yanked the rug out from under me at just the right moment. I think I would have liked this far far less if the entire central cast weren’t women or nonbinary people. If they were all men, their violence and vengeance would have been tiresome. As it is, they were vital and alive and, occasionally, disturbingly erotic.
I do have some concern about what the next book will be doing. It’s going to have to be something very different, given the reveals here. But I’m on board for it.
Content notes: Violence, references to sexual exploitation of minors, genocide.