#thestarhost

Okay, so here's where I admit I've been hanging onto "The Star Host" since before it was released.  I was given a copy for pre-release review.  Sadly, here I am, days after release, and only finally able to read and review it.

The first thing I can say about this book is that F. T. Lukens is a master at making the reader care about her characters.  I liked Ren by the third paragraph, and I never stopped liking him.  In addition to being superhuman, Ren somehow manages to be super human — he feels like a teenager I could have known and hung out with in my own high school days.  Despite their basis in science fiction, his struggles stayed relatable.  Even better, his reactions to the things that happen to him make those events feel almost real.  When Ren was scared, I was scared; when he was happy, or falling in love, so was I.

These are all masterful traits for a narrator.  But Lukens' mastery doesn't stop with Ren: all her secondary characters have that same spark of life, their own clearly rich inner lives that intersect with Ren but don't entirely revolve around him.  The crews of the ships, his fellow captives, even the soldiers around them are all startlingly three-dimensional.  Special mention goes to Asher, who is difficult and funny and cynical and hopeful, in a dizzyingly real reaction to his captivity.  I would share examples and quotes, but I'd really hate to spoil the plot of this one for you

In fact, the plot is the second thing I have to tell you about.  And that's kind of a problem, because it's such a fun one that I want to make sure you're unspoiled for every twist and turn. Lukens balances her action plot and her emotional plots excellently, once again creating the illusion of real people smashing into each other.  Every action has consequences, whether Ren was able to foresee them or not, and those consequences keep everything moving quickly.

Suffice to say that Ren is picked up by his local baron's jackbooted thugs, his capture doesn't go to plan, and he ends up becoming much more important than he could ever have dreamed.  Along the way, he meets a political prisoner who turns out to be just as intriguing, in his own way.

The action plot has a couple of quiet spots, but for the most part, it's fast-paced, and it keeps the reader turning pages, demanding to know what happens next.  Ren hits the ground running, and apart from his capture, he doesn't stop moving, and my heart didn't stop pounding.

Finally, I have to praise the worldbuilding.  Much of it is done through character, and both Ren and Asher are constantly running into things that they view through their own prior experiences.  Lukens doesn't drop a bunch of universe-specific jargon on the reader and doesn't fall into the hard science fiction trap of requiring that absolutely everything be explained through contemporary science and a few made up mathematical formulas.  Ren and Asher are teenagers dealing with something from out of a myth, and their cluelessness on the mechanics behind how the star host works in favor of figuring out how to make it work on their behalf makes perfect sense.  In fact, it's refreshing.