Clockwork hearts in space

[bloodygranuaile]

I’m not reading as much YA these days as I used to, but my ace book club (yes, more book clubs) is reading Rosiee Thor’s debut YA sci-fi Tarnished Are the Stars, the premise of which seemed like a fun adventure read: court intrigue, spies and rebels, dangerous (or at least illegal) technology, lesbians, steampunky clockwork stuff in space. And it did in fact have all that, plus an aroace character (hence why the book club was reading it), and it was reasonably fun and entertaining. But I had some trouble really getting too into it, and I can’t tell how much of this is a “me outgrowing YA” thing and how much is just a “debut novel is a bit amateurish” thing, but bits of it just seemed underdeveloped/under-edited to me. Some of the language was a bit overwritten--not just in terms of overexplaining the emotional stuff in an occasionally maudlin way, which is pretty standard for writing aimed at younger readers, but also I distinctly recall early in the book running across a sentence that started with “Her gaze snapped to…” and being like “F, I hate it when people’s gazes/eyes/ocular jellies do things instead of the people just looking at stuff, is this whole book gonna be like that” and it wasn’t entirely but it was enough to keep me from really sinking into it. There was also some plot stuff that seemed sort of slapped together; there was some figuring out of riddles and clues that seemed less like solving and more like jumping to conclusions that happened to be correct (although the worst of these did turn out to be incorrect, which was nice), and I have some questions about the practicalities of the sneaking-around and avoiding-security that probably stem from me having too much personal experience in that field (there is realistic poor/uneven security and there is Well That’s Extremely Convenient poor/uneven security, and I regret that I can tell the difference). The assorted moral questions about identity and power and leadership were addressed in ways I felt were a bit heavyhanded, but the morals themselves are unobjectionable (I really cannot agree harder with lessons like “loyalty isn’t really a virtue if you are being loyal to absolutely terrible people”). Overall it was an entertaining steampunk adventure, a decent way to spend 3 hours of a rainy long weekend, but I would probably not especially recommend it to anyone unless they had some pretty specific asks like “Do you know any space adventure stories that are about heart disease?”