Book Review | The Blighted Stars

The Blighted Stars by Megan E. O'Keefe delivers an exhilarating new space opera that’s loaded with political intrigue and complex, compelling characters.
The story center around:

- Naira: an environmentalist revolutionary who mysteriously wakes up inside of a different body aboard an enemy ship.

- Tarquin: The heir to the powerful Mercator family who is sent to oversee to the mining operations of a newly discovered planet and whom Naira pretends to act as a bodyguard for.

However, when they arrive on the mining planet, to their surprise, it’s already dead—choked of life—by a strange fungal blight, and the two of them must work together to investigate what happened.

For me, my favorite part of the book had to be the concept of “reprints,”—where, for a price, people can be reprinted out of biomatrix if they die and have their neural pathways/memories transferred into that new body. The wealthy can also have augmentations and enhancements added to their bodies and people in combat-like roles (such as Exemplars) are forced to go through the pain and trauma dying over and over again. Think of it as 3-D printing for humans and it reminded me of Altered Carbon in the best possible way.

Thank you, NetGalley and Orbit, for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Book Details:

Publication Date : May 23, 2023

Publisher : Orbit

ISBN: 0316290793

Pages : 544

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