Hunted - Meagan Spooner

I read the books Meagan Spooner wrote with Amie Kaufman, the These Broken Stars books, which I loved, and when I saw that she had a Beauty and the Beast retelling coming out, I was super excited.  I couldn't wait to see what Spooner would do on her own, and her Beauty sounded awesome: she's a huntress!  How cool.  So I snatched this up the day it came out.  Luckily I had the day off work, because I absolutely devoured this book.

The story follows Yeva, the youngest daughter of a wealthy merchant in medieval Russia.  When Yeva's father loses everything in a caravan that's attacked by the Mongols, he moves the family to his old hunting cabin.  Once a great hunter, he takes to the woods once again...but something is hunting him in return, and it begins to drive him crazy.  When he vanishes, Yeva, who used to hunt with her father, sets out in pursuit of him.

The family dynamics here are so wonderful.  Yeva has such a loving, supportive family.  They all care for each other and lift each other up, even when one person's interests might go directly against another's.  Positive relationships are so rare in fairy tales and young adult books, so seeing one here was a real treat.  But what was an even bigger treat is the main story itself.

It does take a while to get going; this isn't a fast book.  But the writing was beautiful, slowly drawing us into the Russian fantasy world that Yeva inhabits.  Yeva is called Beauty, just as her sisters were named for Grace and Light (though they all have given names as well) but she doesn't get everything she wants just because she's beautiful.  She wants more than her life in their town, desperately, and is actually relieved when they move to her father's hunting cabin, because she thinks she'll be happy if she can just return to hunting in the forest with him like she did when she was younger.  What she really wants is to find the mythic Firebird that her father told her stories of, but she'll settle for hunting.  But as she begins to hunt, working hard to regain skills she's lost, she stumbles into the problem of her father's vanishing--and then his evident death.  Catching and killing the Beast responsible for his death becomes the next thing Yeva wants, and the driving force in the story.  Even when she's the Beast's captive, her motivation is to stay long enough to find his weak spot and kill him, no matter what kindnesses are shown to her.

Minor spoilers here regarding the nature of the curse and the flaw at the center of the story.  There is one big central flaw in this story that I could find, and it has to do with the nature of the Beast's curse.  The Beast has been cursed by the Firebird and the curse can only be broken if the Firebird returns to him on its own.  There's a little twist here, of course, which I won't reveal, but if it's believed that the way to break the curse is to get the Firebird to come back voluntarily...then why would the Beast be trying to kill it?  *scratches head*  I don't think killing it really counts as it coming back voluntarily.

So, yes, there's a central flaw in the logic of the story.  Spooner kind of accommodates for this at the end of the book, where of course breaking the curse isn't what they thought it would be, but it definitely did mar the reading experience for me.  However, I still loved this book.  The slow build (though not a slow burn) and the way that Spooner parallels Yeva's and the Beast's stories was wonderful.  There's a very, very slight love triangle but it's not used in a typical sense, and there is no Disney Gaston here to serve as a central villain.  Really, there is no villain in this book, which I think actually is one of its strengths, because it means the characters are pitted against nature and against their own inner selves, which is a strong conflict to go with.  The overlaying of the fantasy world with the normal world also really worked here, as did Yeva's growing awareness of it.

So, this is not a perfect book.  But I loved it nonetheless, and I can definitely see myself reading it again in the future.  If you like fairy tale retellings, I would definitely recommend this one.

4 stars out of 5.

Their Fractured Light - Annie Kaufman & Meagan Spooner (Starbound #3)

After reading the first Starbound book, These Broken Stars, I carefully rationed myself before reading This Shattered World, the second book, in order to break up the time between reading Shattered World and the release of Their Fractured Light.  Unfortunately, This Shattered World was definitely a case of second-book slump for me, with the romance that had so captured me in Broken Stars being largely missing.  As a result, I bought Their Fractured Light on its release date, but I kind of put off reading it.  Partly it was because I had a stack of library books that I had to work through before their due dates, but it was also partly because I was afraid I'd be disappointed again, and I really didn't want to be.  LUCKILY, when I finally got around to reading it this past week, I was NOT disappointed at all!

Their Fractured Light moves the story to the city where it all began, from whence LaRoux Industries is based, from where the Icarus was launched, and where it all comes to an end.  Our heroine is Sofia Quinn, who we last saw fleeing Avon so she wouldn't be put into the foster system following her father's death at the hands of the whispers/the Fury.  She's been conning her way across the galaxy ever since.  And our hero is Gideon Marchant, the infamous hacker known as the Knave of Hearts and also the younger brother of another Marchant...who was also Lilac LaRoux's first love.  Dun dun DUN!  Gideon and Sofia's paths cross at the headquarters of LaRoux Industries, and they help each other escape when everything goes horribly awry.  There's instant chemistry, and when Gideon leaves, he gives Sofia his contact info in case she ever needs him again.  Which, of course, she does.

In short order, Sofia and Gideon find themselves on the run through and below Corinth, hiding from LaRoux's veritable army and trying to stop him from taking over the galaxy with the whispers as his main weapon.  Betrayals abound, safe havens do not, and through it all are scattered so many other characters that we've encountered along the way.  We also finally get to meet the infamous Monsieur LaRoux, the man behind it all...

My main complaint with This Shattered World was that it was greatly lacking in the romance department.  Jubilee and Flynn were great, they just weren't necessarily great with each other.  I didn't feel like they had the chemistry that Lilac and Tarver had.  Well, that wasn't a problem in Their Fractured Light.  Gideon and Sofia had that chemistry.  Of course, it's a very different dynamic than Tarver and Lilac, because Tarver and Lilac were never keeping secrets the way that Gideon and Sofia are--but that's good, because it means it's not just a repeat, it's a new story, and I felt that it was one that fit the world of Corinth and the story that Kaufman and Spooner built up around the setting and characters.  I'm not so sure about the technology stuff that was going on--sure, it's sci-fi, but some of it still read a little flimsy to me--but I excuse it on the basis that everything else was so good.  My only other issue was that the climax retreads ground a bit--I feel like the authors could have done something a little fresher to tie it all up.  Oh, and that I'm not sure the end would have been as neat and tidy as it came across.

Overall, though, Their Fracture Light definitely didn't suffer from the same slump that This Shattered World did.  It came full circle, tying together plots and characters and bringing everything to what was a satisfying (if a little sickly sweet) conclusion.  I really enjoyed this, and as a bonus, it fits the "Romance set in the future" category for my Popsugar 2016 Reading Challenge!

4 stars out of 5.

This Shattered World - Annie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner (Starbound #2)

I'd been eking out the moments until I read This Shattered World, even though I wanted to devour it in the wake of These Broken Stars, which I read in March.  Coming off These Broken Stars, I was absolutely in love with Tarver and Lilac and their universe--because world is too small a world when it comes to settings like these--and TBS was just so good that I had to force myself to wait to read the next one.  See, when a series isn't completely published yet (and the conclusion to this one won't be out until December) I try to space out the extant books so that I can get a hit every now and then, instead of bingeing and then suffering until the next one comes out.  But with Their Fractured Light looming on the horizon, I decided it was time to read This Shattered World.

And I was disappointed.  Kaufman and Spooner wrote such a vivid world and such a breathtaking, heart-wrenching romance in These Broken Stars that I came to This Shattered World eager for the same.  I didn't get it.  I understand, in a way; I mean, not all of your stories can be the same, or else you're just writing the same thing over and over again.  But even if the plot was different and the characters were different, coming from different directions with different motivations, I still expected there to be that spark, that connection that drew Tarver and Lilac together and made them so fascinating to follow even when they seemingly couldn't stand each others' guts.  Instead, I got Jubilee the soldier and Flynn the rebel.  They were interesting characters, with great stories and motivations, and watching them learn to work together for a common cause that wasn't actually so common was interesting, but it just didn't work for me as a romance--which was the main thing I was looking for in this book.  Jubilee and Flynn are both so focused on their own ends that they only engage in thinking of relationships for brief periods of time.  Granted, those brief periods are great--some very steamy kissing happens during one of them.  But overall, they just came across as distant and awkward, and at the end of the book I remained unconvinced about them as a couple, especially when juxtaposed with how Tarver and Lilac were shown to be so strong together again in this one.

Jubilee was a strong character, and it was interesting to see a female character who's a total badass and a male who's a pacifist, when most fictions have those roles reversed.  But overall I thought the plot and the setting were just...lacking.  Again, this was in comparison to the first book.  In the first book, the Icarus and the planet the characters ended up on was strange and beautiful and terrible in all sorts of ways.  In comparison, Avon is just...meh.  It's a swamp, with will o' the wisps that occasionally show up and ultimately play a part but aren't really explored fully enough to be an enticing element of the setting.  The plot itself focuses on a shaky peace between the soldiers posted on Avon, who are subject to a killing madness called the Fury, and the natives of Avon, who want their planet to pass its inspections so they can have a voice but are constantly told it's "not ready" yet, and who have an ongoing revolt in response.  Ultimately, I felt like the ending was on shaky ground at best.  I didn't feel Jubilee and Flynn's actions would actually realistically result in a peace, no matter how uneasy, or that they would stop whatever fate was coming Avon's way from LaRoux industries.  Let's face it: Avon is a backwater that it's unlikely anyone would care about.  If we can't get people to care about crises a few thousand miles away on one planet, I find it unlikely that people light years away would care about a crisis on another.  Maybe that's just the cynic in me, but I found Tarver and Lilac's use of small-scale blackmail a much more feasible ending than Jubilee and Flynn's declaration.

I'm still looking forward to reading Their Fractured Light, mostly because one of the main characters is Sophia, who was introduced in This Shattered World and was really one of the highlights of it.  I want to see how her charm and harsh background intersect to bring the trilogy to its conclusion.  But for this one...meh.

2.5 to 3 stars out of 5.