SF/F Review: The Space Between the Stars by Anne Corlett https://t.co/4qXCOxopjn Short Review: 7 out of 10 (1/4)— garik16 (@garik16) September 6, 2017
Short Review (cont): A tale of survivors trying to come together and find a future in a galaxy destroyed by an apocalyptic virus (2/4)— garik16 (@garik16) September 6, 2017
The Space Between the Stars is a pretty good example of a book where the individual pieces are much much worse than the whole. I'm very happy I'm not a professional reviewer, as explaining how I feel about this book is really difficult. I listened to this book as an audiobook and the book frequently features some stilted writing, one main character who gets practically no development and one who is just plain annoying by design. And yet this book, which features a postapocalypse universe (ala Station Eleven, as a total package DOES seem to work and I did like it in the end, even as I know I was often exasperated when I was in the middle.Short Review (cont): suffers from some bad characters and meh writing, but somehow comes together to form a solid sweet whole story. (3/4)— garik16 (@garik16) September 6, 2017
More after the jump:
-----------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------
In a far future, humanity has spread to the stars, with its capital planet no longer being earth, and some colonies being far far away from the central planets. The spread of humanity hasn't entirely been by choice, class discrimination has spread beyond Earth and many of the lower classes have had to leave the Earth due to forced discrimination. But none of that matters when a virus with a survival rate of one person in one million spreads throughout the human colonies, devastating the human race, leaving only single survivors in colonies and towns throughout.
Jamie Allenby is one of these survivors, on one of the more distant colonies. She suffered some terrible traumas in her past, which is why she fled to the distant part of humanity. But She soon finds herself on a ship with a couple of other survivors: starship captain Callan, engineer Gracie, former scientist-turned-relgious-fanatic Rena, Priest Lowry, Prostitute Mila, and Mentally Disabled (Autistic?) Finn. Together they journey to the center of humanity, back to Earth, in order to try and find a future that may or may not be waiting for them. Along the way, they'll find that humanity is trying to deal with the apocalypse in many different ways, some horrendous and some merely strange, as they try to find their own path that could possibly be right.
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This book really feels at times like it wants to Be Station Eleven by Emily St. Johns Mandel, in trying to follow the paths of survivors after a post-apocalyptic event (a virus in both books), while also occasionally flashing back to the past. It's really not even close - that's a far better book. The reason for that is pretty clear: the individual elements of this book have some severe problems.
In particular, two of the characters are particularly problematic - Rema is meant to be incredibly irritating to our main character, Jamie, but she's SO one note that it's not just irritating to Jamie, but irritating to the reader as well, and the book spends SOOOO much time with her. The second is the engineer Gracie, who travels with the main crew and basically gets no character development whatsoever - you could remove her from this book with little changes, which makes the occasional moments she takes actions in this book feel very awkward.
The writing is also not particularly well done - there's a lot of repetition in how Jamie relives her traumas (which she's suffered to a comical amount - a bad ending to her relationship with her mother, a miscarriage of a child she never wanted to have, her being the only survivor of a pair of conjoined twins - like the conjoined twin trauma really doesn't add anything), and the one big plot twist is telegraphed like hell 10% of the way in. The Kirkus review of this book is pretty hilariously brutal, and I won't lie and say I don't get where that reviewer is coming from.
But despite all of that, in the end I kind of enjoyed this book. The ending is maybe a bit too predictable (and I was frurstrated it didn't occur much sooner), but it comes together nicely and sweetly. I can't highly recommend a book that frustrated me this much throughout, but this book still is a solid sweet tale of survivors coming together to try and find a future and to figure out how we should live one's own life.
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