This Shattered World Series: Starbound #2 on November 2014
Pages: 394
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Jubilee Chase and Flynn Cormac should never have met.
Lee is captain of the forces sent to Avon to crush the terraformed planet's rebellious colonists, but she has her own reasons for hating the insurgents.
Rebellion is in Flynn's blood. Terraforming corporations make their fortune by recruiting colonists to make the inhospitable planets livable, with the promise of a better life for their children. But they never fulfilled their promise on Avon, and decades later, Flynn is leading the rebellion.
Desperate for any advantage in a bloody and unrelentingly war, Flynn does the only thing that makes sense when he and Lee cross paths: he returns to base with her as prisoner. But as his fellow rebels prepare to execute this tough-talking girl with nerves of steel, Flynn makes another choice that will change him forever. He and Lee escape the rebel base together, caught between two sides of a senseless war.
The stunning second novel in the Starbound trilogy is an unforgettable story of love and forgiveness in a world torn apart by war.
I loved These Broken Stars when I read it last year, and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this second book. I was a little surprised when it introduces new characters on a new world, but it is so worth getting to know Jubilee and Flynn.
The world of Avon is a half-terraformed swamp, where the settlers are reduced to scraping a living and soldiers are stationed to deal with any resurgence of a rebellion. The rebels are hiding out in the swamp, but Flynn Cormac doesn’t want the rebel group, the Irish-heritage Fianna, to take the same path of violence they took last time under the leadership of his sister. Flynn takes matters into his own hands and ends up kidnapping the star soldier, Captain Jubilee “Stone-faced” Chase, to try and make her tell him about a new facility to the east. But when they reach the site, the facility has disappeared without a trace. Jubilee is sure he’s mad, but as she learns more about the rebels and about Flynn, she realises that there is something more going on on Avon that has been kept hidden, stopping the terraforming from continuing and making the soldiers go on violent rampages. If Flynn and Jubilee can solve the mystery, they could stop the war between their people and perhaps the sky on Avon will eventually clear.
This highly anticipated sequel to These Broken Stars was certainly as awesome as I hoped it would be! The action starts for the first chapter and really doesn’t stop. Poor Jubilee and Flynn are thrown from one situation to the next, sustaining all sorts of injuries – just reading about them was kind of exhausting at times!
This is essentially a romance, and although it was all very sweet, I thought it all happened a bit fast and in very stressful circumstances. Jubilee is supposed to be a cold, hard soldier, the take-no-shit Captain who can’t be touched by the mysterious Fury. She drops that persona with Flynn fairly quickly though and starts showing a softer side. I’ll admit to being a little disappointed by that. Flynn was awesome though – the natural rebel leader who is desperate for the bloodshed to end. I would have fallen in love with him!
I was lucky enough to hear Amie Kaufman speak at the Brisbane Writers Festival earlier this year, and she said that she and her co-writer each write chapters from different characters points of view. For example in the first book she wrote Tarver’s chapters and Meagan wrote the chapters from Lilac’s point of view. This sort of method works really well for the alternating viewpoints as the characters voices end up sounding quite different, but they’ve also managed to tie the whole story together so well that it flows very smoothly from chapter to chapter. It’s very compulsive reading.
If you enjoyed These Broken Stars then definitely get a hold of this second book in the series – it’s certainly one of my favourites of the year, and I can’t wait to find out what happens next on the world of Corinth.
– Slightly disappointed by the speed of the romantic development but otherwise, a cracking read. A highly recommended series!
The Starbound Trilogy
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Anni
Anni lives in Brisbane, Australia with her young family. She loves everything fantasy and science fiction and believes sleep is really very underrated.
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