Ratings:
Star Rating: ★★★☆☆
If This Book Was a Movie Rating: PG
Review:
This book is not a brilliant work of classic literature. It’s not a richly gorgeous high fantasy. This is not a romance that shatters hearts the world over. This isn’t even a bleak dystopian that shows a future both beautiful and terrifying.
This book is a 100% certified guilty pleasure read.
and SCREW IT ALL but I actually really enjoyed it.
Let us begin with Ye Olde Synopsis.
It’s been one hundred and seventy years since Earth became uninhabitable. One hundred and seventy years since the last remnants of Earth’s population fled the planet on a small fleet of spaceships, beginning a dazzling new life among the stars.
Since living in space requires a completely new lifestyle society, the survivors built new ways of life to accommodate. Those less fortunate are crammed into the smallest, most dilapidated ships, deprived of the luxuries the richer ships enjoy. The largest spaceships are named after the glories of the old Earth: the Versailles, the Lady Liberty, the Empire, the Shanghai, the Saint Petersburg, the Scandinavian, etc, and can host hundreds of the fleet’s wealthiest inhabitants. Smaller, private ships, like the Islay and the Prinzessin Sofi, are owned and operated by a few select families.
In a world where the human population is a fraction of its size on Earth, making a strategic, early match is everything. That’s why the Valg Season exists: a Bachelor-esque whirlwind of events designed to throw the most eligible children at each other’s heads. At the end of approximately five weeks, engagements are announced, and the future population of the spacebound colony is assured. However, the Season only happens every five years, so connections must be made and engagements secured with the utmost speed.
Leonie Kolburg’s family is on the cusp of both worlds; their rapid decline in fortunes forcing them to rent out their small private ship and live on the monetary goodwill of their rich cousins on the Scandinavian. Leonie’s father and younger sister insist on living lavishly, mindless of how much the family is dependent on their rich relations. The only reason her family isn’t bankrupt already is because of Leo’s frugal financial management.
But this year, the Valg season is returning, and considering this is Leonie’s last eligible season, her father is constantly pressuring her to make a wealthy match and save the family’s fortunes. But since making that match would require her to forget Elliot Wentworth, Leo isn’t exactly too eager to get engaged. Elliot was the servant boy who she fell desperately in love with three years prior. She was engaged to him for several hours, before her overbearing aunt and father bullied her into breaking off the “deeply improper” match.
Put another way, he was too poor for her.
Leo believes she will never see Elliot Wentworth again, until a now rich and titled Elliot shows up during the Valg’s opening ball, and Leo realizes she’ll have to watch him fall in love with someone else right in front of her eyes.
YES FINALLY I GET TO DISCUSS MY OWN THOUGHTS do y’all know how long that summary took me to write
*laughs while sobbing very slightly*
Firstly and foremostly: the plot.
The plot felt like the craziest mashup of the Bachelor, speed dating, regency traditions, black market space trading, and class divisions.
Literally that was the plot.
and NO ONE tell me that that Bachelor action wasn’t half the novel there is literally a gold rose on the cover.
For being a story set in future dystopian space, I didn’t really feel like the cool scifi part of the book was that great or even all that relevant. You know how there’s books in scifi settings that actually use plot points related to holograms or netscreens to move everything forward?
Yeah this was not that.
This was more a dramatic rich person romance that happened to be set in space. I didn’t care that it wasn’t really true scifi, but just don’t go into this thinking you’ll get cutting edge scifi action and you’ll be fine.
Speaking of the romance, I want to mention that this story is billed as a retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Now, to those non-Austen superfans among you, this is no cause for concern. The similarities are really not that obvious, and you definitely don’t need to have ever even touched a copy of Persuasion to enjoy the story.
LE CHARACTERSSS
Overall, the characters were nothing special.
WAIT NO I TAKE THAT BACK EXCEPT FOR EVGENIA. HAH THAT GIRL WAS ABSOLUTELY HILARIOUS.
57% of my enjoyment of this novel came from Evgenia being sarcastic, Evgenia playing matchmaker, Evgenia tossing people into pools, the NUMBER OF TIMES THIS GIRL MADE ME CACKLE Y’ALL YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE.
Anyways. Everyone except Evgenia was kinda bland and complained about rich people problems, which just got kinda annoying after 200 pages or so.
Leo, our intrepid heroine, was enjoyable for the most part, but she gave off a few vibes of rich-person-trying-to-help-poor-people-but-does-a-horrible-job-because-she’s-too-speshul-to-know-what-true-suffering-is. Also, her complaint that she knows pain because she has to manage her family’s finances?
girl, I do that every time I walk into Barnes & Noble. Be quiet.
But besides the occasional whine, Leo really just wasn’t that bad.
Now, Elliot though.
Elliot definitely wasn’t as amazing as I’d hoped he’d be. While the original character he was based on, Captain Wentworth (no, the name was definitely not changed *rolls eyes dramatically*) was literally my book boyfriend when I first read Persuasion, his modern counterpart here was just meh. Elliot acted like a jerk, he was unnecessarily passive aggressive, and I had so much trouble seeing real romantic connection with Leo.
Speaking of which, that’s another thing: the romance between Elliot and Leo was pretty much just TOLD to me. Leo told me soooo maaaaanyyyy tiiiiimeees she and Elliot are madly in love and they are just so sImiLAr.
Let us look at a brief example. Elliot said something to the effect of: “Oh, we both love having our first dates reading on a cramped loveseat in the middle of winter!”
Leo then thinks, “Gasp, we’re clearly soulmates!!”
…
honey, do you even know how much that doesn’t work in real life?
sooooo i’ve kinda just dissed these characters for the last three paragraphs, but in reality, the drama and the eccentricities of the plot more than made up for the most annoying parts.
That’s why I said this was a total guilty pleasure read. No one watches the Bachelor because it’s deep, high-quality entertainment.
But do they watch it anyways?
100% YES.
Friend me on Goodreads (yes, you, I wanna be your friend): https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/136268749-isabelle
Buy this book: https://www.amazon.com/Stars-We-Steal-Alexa-Donne-ebook/dp/B07LC9LRSP/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1638458257&sr=8-1
Recommendations If You Liked This Book:
The Selection by Kiera Cass
Cinder by Marissa Meyer
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