But on August 8, everything changes, and Autumn has to rely on all her strength to move on. In the summer after graduation, Autumn and Finny reconnect and are finally ready to be more than friends. Growing up, Autumn and Finny were like peas in a pod despite their differences: Autumn is “quirky and odd,” while Finny is “sweet and shy and everyone like him.” But in eighth grade, Autumn and Finny stop being friends due to an unexpected kiss. They drift apart and find new friends, but their friendship keeps asserting itself at parties, shared holiday gatherings and random encounters. The finely drawn characters capture readers’ attention in this debut.Īutumn and Phineas, nicknamed Finny, were born a week apart their mothers are still best friends. Tipping between science fiction and fantasy, this series opener will catch readers who enjoy melodramatic sparring and those who can look past it for outer-space thrills with moral complexity, see Beth Revis’ Across the Universe series. It’s a thin, annoying line between love and hate (guess which wins) that makes the adventure elements vie for attention. He’s bitter and occasionally rough (in the throes of a fever, he hits her) she’s an entitled heiress whose pale, white skin warrants mention no matter who’s narrating. Less successful is the seemingly endless (and textually forced) clashing between the protagonists. Lilac and Tarver alternate first-person narration ratcheting up the suspense are single-page chapters in which an unknown authority interrogates Tarver. The jam-packed plot incorporates telepathy, energy-matter conversion, an unknown life form, an explosion, two cave-ins and a temporary death. When they reach it, the ship’s a hazardous tomb of rotting bodies. This unknown planet has been terraformed, but frighteningly, there are no colonists-or anyone else. Their escape pod lands far from the ship, so Lilac and Tarver trek through cold and rain to reach the main crash site. When the richest girl in the galaxy and a burned-out war hero from lowly beginnings are the only survivors of a spaceship crash that kills 50,000 people, they grudgingly cooperate to survive.

Overdone characterizations threaten to overwhelm an exciting outer-space adventure.

These broken stars series in order