4.25 stars An absolute delight of a sci-fi novel. Yes, it's a heist book, but it's also a lot more than that in ways that I'm just going to let you figure out as you read because it's such a fun ride to take.

The pacing in this book is great. I'm in the midst of a gnarly reading slump where it feels I can barely focus on written words for more than 5 minutes at a time, and still this book managed to break through that and had me hooked very fast with the opening chapters and excited to keep going. The highs and lows and the action and the downtime and the discoveries are all just balanced out really well in this story. The core group of characters are fun and varied and feel real and believable (even the one with all the tentacles) and the way we integrate everyone together in the story is, to repeat myself, paced very well.

The action is good, the tension is well timed, there's humor and grief and loss and love and a taste of Found Family and more story than the synopsis preapres you for, which is a GREAT way to do a synopsis rather than revealing far too much in an attempt to hook people in. What can I say? I really enjoyed my time with this book.

Kitasei has a vision of the future in both of her novels now (The Deep Sky set in near future and now The Stardust Grail set in far future) that does so well at striking tones both pessimistic and optimistic, at finding the good in the bleak, and never leaves you too mired in one over the other. And the way she maintains humanity and culture in these stories - and particularly here in The Stardust Grail - is something I really wish we saw more of. So many sci-fi stories - once they escape the bounds of Earth and go interstellar with other planets and aliens and far flung adventures - tend to flatten humanity to one homogenous Human™ culture (often a white, western sense of culture) among the interstellar community, but Kitasei maintains her characters' individuality. Maya may be a spacefaring thief, but she's also a half-Japanese half-American struggling grad student living between two cultures just on the human side, not to mention her otherworldly travels. It's grand in its physical scale and yet still feels grounded and relatable and realistic and human.

I also really appreciate what this story has to say about colonialism and anthrocentrism and again Kitasei strikes a great balance of making the astronomical feel relatable and knowable to the 21st century earth-bound human reading the story.

In case it wasn't clear, I had a great time with this one.

LAST BIT, the audiobook for this one is great! The narrator does a great job with the voices and makes some really cool choices in the style for sections I won't get into here. do recommend if you're an audio reader.

I loved this book so much I asked the author if she'd to sit down for an interview and she kindly agreed! So here's that conversation.

[I read this book as an Advanced Reader Copy in two forms. The Audiobook, through NetGalley, provided by the publisher; and a physical copy, provided by the author.]186 s1 comment Veronica RothAuthor 54 books461k

Coming at you with another "here's the blurb"/"here are my unvarnished thoughts" review--

I blurbed this book because I really loved The Deep Sky (which I bought simply because it sounded interesting, something that becomes rarer the longer you work in book publishing, because you get to know so much of the behind-the-scenes stuff and you hear about things so early, etc.). Anyway, I loved this one, too, and here's what I said about it blurb-wise:

"Come to THE STARDUST GRAIL for Indiana Jones-style outer space heist adventure, stay for the sensitively drawn characters and thoughtful exploration of other forms of life far beyond our own-- Yume Kitasei's second novel is an engaging, fascinating story that you don't want to miss."

That blurb really hits all the beats of why I loved this book-- Yume Kitasei knows all about a tense, high-stakes plot. The Deep Sky was a locked room thriller in which the "locked room" in question was a spaceship, which made the stakes that much higher; The Stardust Grail is a heist in which the setting for the heist is a system of planets, and the stakes are, you know, the survival of a species.

But despite the HIGH, HIGH STAKES, there is a feeling of intimacy in this story that made it easy to connect to-- the same thing was true of The Deep Sky, which dug into the friendships and history of the people inside the aforementioned locked room. Here, the focus is on a friendship between two people of very different species, and their ways of being are impossibly mysterious to each other, which is sometimes just amusing and sometimes...heartbreaking. It feels an exaggeration of any friendship between people of different backgrounds, that we can love each other without perfect understanding, but our love doesn't keep us safe from conflict.

This book is a tangle of questions about loyalty and love and understanding and survival, and I feel describing it that way might for some reason communicate to you that this book is not EXTREMELY FUN, but . Let me assure you. This book is also extremely fun.

Anyway: read it, please and thank you.147 s1 comment Mai900 452

2024 API Month

You had me at anti-colonial space heist. I find the colonization of worlds fascinating, as surely humans aren't the only beings out there. Maya Hoshimoto didn't grow up on Earth, but a mostly Japanese populated colony world. She is infected, which is mentioned often, but not really in a wow sort of way.

Space operas are often hit or miss with me, but I enjoyed the cast of characters in this one. I think this was made better on audio, as the voices truly brought this story to life. I don't want to spoil anything, as many things happen, but I truly enjoyed the ride.


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