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| Cover image Courtesy of publisher |
If you’re a fan of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, or the Divergent series by Veronica Roth, this first book in a relatively new series treads familiar waters. Red Star, by Mary Flint tells the tale of two teens on opposite sides of a growing rebellion against authoritarianism on a far away planet known as Rendaria. Edrix is in enforcement, a promising REGS soldier of rank, ready to do what’s necessary to uphold the law, until a clash with protestors goes horribly wrong and he’s accused of treasonous actions after an attempt to do the morally right thing. He flees prior to his sentence and winds up falling in with the members of the rebellion he was sworn to do battle against.
This is where we find Andresha, a teenage rebel out to protect the inhabitants of the deeper levels of a population that lives underground from the more privileged societies that live closer to the surface. Andresha and Edrix must learn to trust each other before they become a team, and their relationship develops accordingly during a series of trials in a competition to win a contract to be bounty hunters for an unknown entity.
Yes, if you are a fan of scifi YA dystopia, you are going to see many familiar themes here. But you might find more merit in the author’s talent for world and character building. According to her author bio, Flint was 15 when she started writing this book, which she published two years later. Characterizations and the ability to carve out a decent plot make this a reason to continue watching Mary Flint, although I was expecting more from the ending. It’s open ended to likely entice readers to continue with book two, but it leaves book one without a satisfying conclusion. It’s also pretty confusing to end with a significant character presumably (spoiler) dead only to foreshadow the next book with a final chapter that finds them in a totally different world than Rendaria. I’m not going to add more spoilers than that except to say that it’s not well explained in any manner shape or form, and instead of setting up the intrigue to learn why, I was left with a head shake trying to understand how it made any sense. Ultimately it felt like a huge stretch without the plot providing any thread of a clue. And we don’t know for certain if the story’s main mission—to disable a core computer and render the files within it unreadable—worked.
But maybe that’s everything book two is supposed to cover… You can find her Red Star series of books here, or wherever ebooks are sold.
