Thursday, April 15, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Scavenge the Stars by Tara Sim

 



Scavenge the Stars is the first in a young adult low fantasy duology by author Tara Sim.  The duology is an adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, featuring as one of its two protagonists a girl sold to a debtor ship as a little girl before coming back fully grown, pretending to nobility in order to enact her revenge.  The book was originally published by a Disney imprint, but if you're expecting a book filled with light fare, you'll be surprised, this book is hardly grimdark but features some really dark moments and some serious themes to go along with everything.

But Scavenge the Stars makes that darkness generally work really really well.  Both its main characters, Amaya, the girl who wants revenge but finds herself slipping without an identity, and Cayo, the boy who is trying to recover from a gambling/alcohol addiction to be the man his sister wants him to be, are really really strong and the plot gives them substantial room to develop in fascinating ways.  More experienced readers will see a bunch of the twists coming fairly early in the plot, but the book executes them very well, with the exception perhaps of one deus ex machina at the end which helps set up the following book.  In short, this is a really strong YA fantasy and I will be very much looking forward to reading the sequel.  
Note: I read this in audiobook, and I did enjoy the reader a lot, so this is definitely worth your time in that format.  
---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------------
Amaya was just a little girl when her father was accused of crimes she knows he didn't commit and her family was forced into enough debt that she was forced into hard labor on a debtor ship.  Now, seven years have passed, and Amaya - now called Silverfish - has almost paid off her debt, just in time to return to her home city of Moray for her mother's birthday. 

But when Amaya can't help but rescue a man seemingly drowning on the seas, she finds her whole world upended: for while the man, a rogue named Boon, helps her back to Moray, her mother is dead and everything she left behind is gone.  Instead, Boon enlists her in a plan: help him get revenge upon the merchant who ruined him, a merchant named Mercado, and he will help her get revenge on those who ruined her family.  

Amaya intends to make the plan work by targeting Mercado's son, Cayo, a boy of her own age who is known for his immaturity - gambling and drinking the night away.  But she soon realizes Cayo is more than that - a boy who has tried to turn away from his addictions who will do anything to save his sick sister - and has no clue of his father's misdeeds.  And so Amaya finds herself questioning whether she is willing to perform the plan, for the sake of those she left behind and the revenge she desires in her own heart......
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Scavenge the Stars is the tale of its two protagonists, Amaya and Cayo, in the style of many YA books these days - the dual protagonists of different genders alternate points of view as the story forces them together and they start to fall for one another, even as other events conspire to prevent them from coming together.*  The story plays a quick trick with the timeline at first, with Cayo's story beginning in Moray and Amaya taking a few chapters seemingly to get there, but it's pretty clear what's happening to a reader with any experience from the start (Amaya's cover identity as a countess being an anagram for her real name will only help print readers with this).  Moreover, if you are familiar with the Count of Monte Cristo at all - and I admittedly have never read the original so I'm not very - you will not be surprised by some of the early twists of the setup.  

*It should be noted that despite this setup being between a guy and a girl, Cayo is bisexual and the story features a completely LGBTQ-friendly world, with multiple non-het characters as well as an NB side character who pops up twice.  The fact that the two protags are of opposite genders is more coincidence than an essential element to their romance.*

But despite the conventional story framework and even if you are familiar with the inspiration-story, Scavenge the Stars stands out because both of its two main characters are excellent.  Amaya is the more conventional of the two for stories like this - the girl who comes back home to find out parts of her sheltered past were a lie, who seeks out vengeance only to find killing isn't simply easy, the con-artist with a heart of gold....these are all her.  She cares about the other kids who were on the debtor ship with her and is desperate to save them.  And she's so easy to root for with her good heartedness, even through years of suffering, and her desperation to - with her whole past unmoored - find a way to be simply herself, or to find a way to figure out what being herself actually is, is a really strong character arc.  

Then there's Cayo, who you might think is going to be the "playboy with a heart of gold" character, as others seem to think he is.  But whereas other books might make the playboy aspect seem appealing or praised by the setting, Scavenge the Stars does not: Cayo is an addict (of gambling mainly, although alcohol comes alongside it), who can barely keep himself away from the casinos where he once got into trouble with the Slum King, the man who controls the underground gambling world (and perhaps more) of Moray.  Cayo is desperately trying to be a good son, to be on the straight and narrow, not for his merchant father, but for his beloved sister, Soria, who falls possibly fatally ill at the start.  As Cayo desperately tries to obtain the medicine to save her, he too discovers that his father isn't who he thought he was, causing him to fall in to a tailspin that could all too easily lead him back to the "Vice Sector" and the casino tables.  

Cayo and Amaya's characters work really well on their own and together they have a ton of chemistry, even if their meet cute where the two don't know who the other is and say blunt things about each other is pretty typical.  The romance doesn't go very far in this book, due to the two's own problems, and the most on page that occurs is a kiss, but it's all done very well, and even as it is clearly inevitable from the beginning, it is incredibly believable.  

The side characters also work decently, even if few of them are developed very much, as they have interesting traits that made me want to read more of them, especially the Slum King's daughter, Romara.  And the setting is certainly really interesting, with Moray serving as an independent city between two Empires, which both Empires covet for their own for its waterways and prosperity, and the punishments of Moray and the Empires often being to declare people to be "landless", and forced to sea on punishment of death. 

It helps build the background to a plot that is predictable in some fashions - I saw the reveal before the ending coming from practically the very start and I suspect most readers will as well - but is executed very well.  Fair warning: it's a dark plot at times, where even children aren't safe from beatings or murder, but none of these dark elements seemed excessive to me.  And the plot deals with some serious themes such as class and privilege, of the dangers and horrors of addiction, of the sins of fathers and how those affect their children, and it deals with all these themes very well. 

It leads up to an ending is a satisfying end to a single volume, even as it presents a clear path forwards for the second half of this duology.   The biggest issue with the plot is that the ending relies a bit on a deus ex machina, in that a character missing for near the entire volume shows up to provide a path forwards in a way too coincidental fashion, but that's not much of a big issue considering how well everything else is done.

In short, I really liked Scavenge the Stars, and look very much forward to reading the sequel which was just released in March of 2021.  
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