bloodygranuaile

I picked up Kameron Hurley’s The Stars Are Legion from the library because I remember liking the first book in her God’s War series and I also remember The Stars Are Legion being pitched as “lesbians in space,” therefore it fits with Project No More Heterosexual Romantic Subplots 2020. That’s… really all I knew going into it.

In keeping with the only other Hurley book I’ve read, this book is not so much gritty and grimdark as it is gory and gross, being both extremely violent and extremely biological. The planets in the solar system known as the Legion are essentially big multileveled animals, with skins and tentacles and arteries and other viscera, and also they all have cancer. Everything is very dim and unpleasant and sticky, whether you’re in the recycling pits at the center of the world or out in space in a vehicle made of slug. This is not something I necessarily mind on principle, but I think I was some sort of not in the right mood for it, because I had trouble really getting into the book and keeping my attention on reading it until nearly the end.

The plot is the sort of thing I like, convoluted and violent and about a power struggle consisting of multiple layers of deception, with a side of amnesia on the part of our main viewpoint character. The characters are basically all terrible, but in reasonably interesting ways--the main character’s horror at the clues she gets about her past self is intriguing, the second viewpoint character’s carefully calculated deceptions and self-loathing is a fun contrast; the enemy Lord that Jayd gets herself married off to is interestingly ruthless. The secondary characters are variable.

Honestly, I wanted to like it more than I did. I think it’s quite good but that wasn’t quite the same thing.