Thursday, October 8, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Star Daughter by Shveta Thakrar

Star Daughter is the debut novel for author Shveta Thakrar and is a Young Adult novel based upon Indian/Hindu myth.  It's a novel that hasn't quite been as hyped in the mainstream press as some other YA books I've seen this year, but in the SF/F circles on social media that I follow, It's been incredibly well regarded, putting it on my list of books to look for.  Except none of my libraries had a copy, so I had to wait for it to come via inter-library loan to get a chance to read it.  

And Star Daughter is tremendous and worthy of all the acclaim and more.  It's a story of a 16/17 year old girl torn between her two worlds, dealing with struggles both as a teenager dealing with other teens and as a child among adults all of whom have very different expectations for her.  Of course, by "between two worlds", I mean that the protagonist is literally half-star and part of both our real world and a fantasy world that is incredibly well done.  All that together with a plot that takes some tremendous turns near the end and well, this might be my favorite Young Adult novel of the year.

-----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
Sheetal Mistry is nearing her 17th birthday and should be worrying about normal things for a 17 year old girl in New Jersey - the boyfriend Dev she can't believe she has, the idea of studying for the PSATs, the usual.  But Sheetal has a secret - her mother was a Star, who left when Sheetal was a child to take her place back in the sky.  Sheetal is instructed by her aunt and father to hide her inhuman heritage, using black hair dye for her silver hair for example, but more and more it just seems like her disguises aren't working for very long, and she keeps hearing the sound of starsong...calling to her, even as she wishes she could just be a normal human.

But when her Star blood acts up in a bit of emotion and hurts her father, she discovers that the only way to help him is a path she could never have imagined: following her mother into the world of the sky to seek the blood of a full-blooded-Star.  But what she finds in the sky is not what she could have imagined: a contest of Mortals in the arts, with the right to rule the Heavens at stake.  To get the help she needs for her father, she just needs to win the contest, despite the fact that her competitors are some of the best artists - singers, painters, writers and more - in the world and have been preparing for months, while she just has a few days.

But the more Sheetal discovers about the world of the Stars, and her long-unknown family, the more she realizes that the Stars aren't the ideal people of her mother's childhood stories, with their own secrets and agendas for Sheetal and everyone else.  And so she begins to wonder - even if she can win the contest, will that really allow her to save her father, and what will be the ultimate cost of doing so?
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Star Daughter is told from the third person perspective of Sheetal, but honestly it feels almost as if the novel is written in first person at times, with us following Sheetal intimately and never seeing inside the minds of any other characters outside of one very minor point.  There are a lot of themes going on here and a lot of different characters with different agendas, and many are done well (more on that later).

But this is Sheetal's story and Sheetal is a tremendous character to carry it all.  She's a teenager who wants to be a normal teen, but is torn apart by expectations that others have for her, whether by her normal teenage peers and their adults or by her Celestial family.  As a girl, she sees the Indian community in New Jersey obsess about the elite test scores or talents of others as if those are the only things of value.  In the Sky, her grandparents are obsessed only with the superior value of stars, and the people there only seem to care again about art and inspiration, not about people for their own value.  Whereas in the human realm, Sheetal is sort of made to feel like a disappointment, in the heavens she is made to feel like a tool, which means she faces burdens in both places.  And this feeling isn't helped by those she wanted to trust seeming to keep things from her, things that suggest they too really want to use her for their own purposes, instead of valuing her for what she wants to be.  

And really that's a major focus of this plot: Sheetal trying to deal with expectations and to figure out not just what she wants, especially as she's forced to undergo changes she can't actually stop - except in her case it isn't just growing in age, but it's shifting biologically closer to that of a Star and losing her humanity in the process.  Almost Everyone (more on that in a second) wants something from her - the boy she loved seemingly only wanted inspiration; her grandparents want her to win the contest to give them the power of rule so that they can choose how humanity and the stars will interact in the future; and her mother wants that same power of rule to try and help humanity in a very different fashion.  Seemingly at times no one cares what Sheetal wants, and when the rare person does, she feels guilty about feeling sorry for herself...until the very end.  

Of course, while this growth and need to handle expectations and one's own desires is a major theme here in the novel, it's not the only one.  We also have here the worthiness of humanity, especially given some of the horrors it's committed, as compared to the Stars that are supposedly so much better (non-spoiler really, they're not), and how it would be best to help them...and what might be going too far.  In a really impressive side moment, the Stars watch a human painter, inspired by their magic, paint not something hopeful, but the agony of betrayal and suffering - because it is what humanity has to get through over and over....and the Stars cannot understand it, thinking that what should be celebrated are only good things.  In another moment, we see a character who is basically the embodiment of male selfishness, supposedly a genius writer, put forth a story of men gawking over a woman and destroying her, which the characters note is just utterly gross.  This book is filled with little moments like that, touches that deal with other themes that aren't the main focus, and none of them feel underserved like they might otherwise.

The plot and the other characters are really well done as well, from the antagonistic characters to Sheetal's best friend Minal is a joy, another teen who would seemingly love to trade places with Sheetal and be special, but absolutely cares for Sheetal and wants the best for her without really showing any jealousy anyhow.  Minal's optimistic nature contrasts really well with Sheetal, and when she finds her own love interest, it works really well and I just desperately wanted it to work out.  Sheetal's aunt and mother each have different views for her, both out of love albeit both with their problems, and they work really well to show how caring parental figures can harm.  And love interest Dev has his own plot arc that works really well to come together in the end.  

These characters help guide the plot to a truly tremendous ending, complete with plot twists along the way that are often predictable....and often completely not.  The result is incredibly satisfying, and yet absolutely not, and I really want there to be a sequel to see how things go from here....even if the book absolutely does not need one.  So yeah, this is a winner.

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