Marth Muffins

These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs

Whilst I had a lot of fun with this one, especially with the Esek and Chono focused sections, sadly the book never fully clicked into place for me to truly love it. The main stars here are the aforementioned Esek and Chono. They're easily the most nuanced and multi-faceted characters present here and their relationship, with the added third wheel complication of Six, is what kept my attention throughout. Esek is who shines here, her manipulations, her violence, and her whole attitude to life stand in such stark contrast to everyone else in this book. Where pretty much everyone else here is rather solemn and/or withdrawn into themselves Esek really is the Burning One, blazing through the story with so much glee and murderousness and plots on plots. Chono meanwhile does feel somewhat undercooked, we focus a lot more on her relationships to other people than necessarily who Chono is which, whilst integral to her character and how she behaves, leaves her with less foundation to build from than Esek. I do worry that Six replacing Esek will lead to the sequels losing me as the series will no longer have 90% of the reasons I enjoyed this novel but we'll see whenever I get around to reading the rest of these whether that's the case.

The other half or so of this book, centred on Jun, Liis, and Masar, loses me though. I just don't really care about these characters? I did find Jun and Liis as a couple very solid and compelling, plus at one point Liis straps Jun which waow @-@ I don't care if some readers find it out of place Jacobs wanted to write some ladies fucking and I will always support a lesbian with this goal o7. Ahem anyways besides their actual relationship I just did not find their characters compelling on an individual level, nor did I find their plotline or struggles nearly as compelling as the events unfolding around Esek and Chono. This changed somewhat in the last third or so as the book's plotlines and characters began to converge but I was still reading Jun's chapters patiently waiting to return to Chono's or Esek's chapters.

World-wise I was never super engaged either. It's there, there's some interesting ideas peppered throughout but they're never explored in enough detail for me to really become interested or invested. I know there's a Kindom and Ruling Families and a religious system but I really don't know much about them beyond the dealings of the Nightfoot family. Despite two of our main characters being Clerics of the central religion, one of whom who actually cares deeply about said religion, I don't really know anything about that religion besides the names of the gods and where they're worshipped. Similarly the Kindom is just there as a vague "Interstellar Empire" with no real insight into how it operates and despite being the central confilct of the book the conflict between Jeve and the rest of the Kindom is quite underbaked. It's a fun sandbox to play around in but nothing stands out as particularly compelling element, but rather a series of sketched out ideas which haven't been filled out yet.

Overall this review has been a lot more negative than I intended. I would like to reiterate that I did enjoy this book, the sections with Esek were genuinely super good, but it did just leave me somewhat cold by the time I reached the final page. I do still think the book is worth checking out though, and I do plan to hop into book two at some point in the future!