These Broken Stars
Dec. 30th, 2013 11:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliThese Broken Stars by Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner
Aboard the starship Icarus, the war hero Tarver Merendsen must attend a party with the upper crust -- expected after all his decorations -- and sees a lovely girl, without actually managing to recognize her as Lilac LaRoux, the daughter (and only child) of the richest man in the universe. She lets herself talk to him, but soon after, when he tries to talk to her again, she remembers how her father would react and repulses him.
Hours later, there is some kind of accident. Orders go out, to go to escape pods. Lilac is knocked off a balcony, and away from her entourage, by stampeding passengers. Tarver hauls her back onto sound footing, and she, knowing where there is a maintenance escape pod. gets them there.
It jams. She hot-wires it. They end up crash landing on a planet in the later stages of terraforming, and yet having no colonists to come to the rescue. Not to mention it has only pole trees, planted in the first stages, but has very rich air. When Tarver gets them away from the pod, they find no other survivors, dead passengers, a wild cat large enough to mean danger for them (not normal procedure).
It's when Lilac starts to hear the sounds of weeping or voices in the night that things really start to get weird.
It involves finding their way back to the Icarus, Lilac's wearing a dead woman's boots, Tarver's dead brother and his poet mother, the way Lilac's father protects her, snow in the mountains, discovering an old station, flowers, Lilac's worrying about whether water falling from the sky is hygienic, and much more.
I warn that it has one twist that means it's not light reading.
Aboard the starship Icarus, the war hero Tarver Merendsen must attend a party with the upper crust -- expected after all his decorations -- and sees a lovely girl, without actually managing to recognize her as Lilac LaRoux, the daughter (and only child) of the richest man in the universe. She lets herself talk to him, but soon after, when he tries to talk to her again, she remembers how her father would react and repulses him.
Hours later, there is some kind of accident. Orders go out, to go to escape pods. Lilac is knocked off a balcony, and away from her entourage, by stampeding passengers. Tarver hauls her back onto sound footing, and she, knowing where there is a maintenance escape pod. gets them there.
It jams. She hot-wires it. They end up crash landing on a planet in the later stages of terraforming, and yet having no colonists to come to the rescue. Not to mention it has only pole trees, planted in the first stages, but has very rich air. When Tarver gets them away from the pod, they find no other survivors, dead passengers, a wild cat large enough to mean danger for them (not normal procedure).
It's when Lilac starts to hear the sounds of weeping or voices in the night that things really start to get weird.
It involves finding their way back to the Icarus, Lilac's wearing a dead woman's boots, Tarver's dead brother and his poet mother, the way Lilac's father protects her, snow in the mountains, discovering an old station, flowers, Lilac's worrying about whether water falling from the sky is hygienic, and much more.
I warn that it has one twist that means it's not light reading.