The Stars Too Fondly

The Stars Too Fondly
Emily Hamilton, 2024

Premise: Chloe and her friends meant to break into the old spaceship and try to find out what happened to the crew. They didn't intend to end up on a trip across the galaxy. 

This is a light fluffy read if you're in a light fluffy romance mood. I didn't hate it overall, but the sci-fi parts were terrible.

I didn't find the characters particularly compelling, but the story was interesting enough, at least at first. The group felt a little checkbox-y, by which I mean that our main protagonist Chloe was "just" a lesbian, but the others "checked off" a bunch of other minority groups, but not in a way that really affected the story, other than the fact that they were a bunch of different flavors of queer and a tight group of friends. 

So they are exploring this ship that was supposed to be humanity's great attempt at the stars 20 years earlier, but the crew vanished on the day that was supposed to be the launch. When these kids (they're supposedly all near 30, but act more like 18) arrive, the ship suddenly powers up and takes off, also bathing them in dark energy and granting various super powers. 

They eventually figure out what happened to the crew and why the launch failed, and there's even an epic confrontation with a villain. It wasn't a bad experience to read, but the sci-fi aspects just made me want to send the author a bunch of homework. It raises a bunch of interesting questions, but insists on the least interesting, easiest answer for each. 

The situation with the "villain" is a problem. There's actually a good question there about whether humanity has the right to hurt an apparently sentient, but completely unknowable, species in another dimension to save ourselves. But the book doesn't even begin to engage with it. Once the characters understand the situation, the answer is obviously the one that you would learn in a kid's animated movie. Plus doing the "right" thing ends with happy endings for everyone except the person who had the "wrong" opinion on the question. 

Worse, in my opinion, is that the sci-fi ruins the romance. Chloe falls in love with a hologram programmed with the personality and memories of the ship's former captain. This is all good and sweet and fine. The questions around the nature of loving a hologram are attempted and interesting. And then we find out that conveniently the real captain (who's been in alternate dimension stasis) can sometimes see what's going on in the "real" world. This is so that after the hologram nobly sacrifices herself and the real captain and the other crew make it back, she's already in love with Chloe, and despite a short pause, the book basically side-steps all the moral and emotional questions that should bring up, and they get together for the "real" happy ever after. 

Sigh. 

2 Stars - An Okay Book