Starsight by Brandon Sanderson
Published November 26, 2019
All her life, Spensa has dreamed of becoming a pilot. Of proving she’s a hero like her father. She made it to the sky, but the truths she learned about her father were crushing.
Spensa is sure there’s more to the story. And she’s sure that whatever happened to her father in his starship could happen to her. When she made it outside the protective shell of her planet, she heard the stars–and it was terrifying. Everything Spensa has been taught about her world is a lie.
But Spensa also discovered a few other things about herself–and she’ll travel to the end of the galaxy to save humankind if she needs to.
Ok so… I have feelings. And they’re mostly good, which I’d say is a good thing. But, I’m having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that there were some parts of this book that I didn’t like. I feel like I had really high expectations for the book and did it live up to them? It’s about 50/50. I re-read Skyward just to prepare myself FULLY for Starsight. But anyway…let’s really dive into why I feel a bit conflicted on how much I truly loved it.
The beginning of the book picks off kind of where you’d assume Skyward left off. The DDF has studied M-BOT to help their technologies, they use Spensa and M-BOT to defeat the Krell which they know more about etc. But when an alien craft crash lands of Detritus and Spensa goes to check out what happens, she finds out the alien is also a cytonic and imprints her destination in Spensa’s mind, her destination being a Superiority ship called Starsight where she was going to learn to be a fighter pilot… I won’t go too much further into this, but I thought this was such great set-up for this book. And setting it up kind of like an Ocean’s 11/espionage type of mission was SO GREAT. Spensa’s mission being to learn exactly how the Superiority creates hyperdrives so the people of Detritus can GTFO. So I was HOOKED when I caught wind of this being like a spy/espionage type of book, those are my absolute favorites.
And then, it happened, it all just slowed down. To a pace that I hate to use the word, but it dragged. It did, just a bit. And I know there’s a lot of setup in terms of espionage/spy books and they’re a bit slower paced but I mean, there’s usually some suspense or a slip up here or there, but there was nothing, for a whole middle section of a book, other than Spensa training these alternate alien races how to be fighter pilots. It was mostly regurgitation from Skyward (I feel like an ass for writing all this but…it’s my F E E L I N G S. Please, Brandon Sanderson if you see this don’t hate me.)
But then, THEN, the catalyst to all of this was great. Once you hit that late middle/end section of the book. Boy, does it redeem itself. It was seriously hard for me to stop. I had to keep going because it was like getting back into the twists and turns and just overall amazingness of Skyward. I just got so invested into all the new characters, and everything going on it was so wonderful. Everything between M-BOT, Doomslug, Kitsen, Vapor, Cuna, Morriumur (yes, these are all new characters, and yes you’re going to love them) was so well done, it completely turned around my feelings for this book.
All that being said, I’m really hoping this third book gets back into the action because I’m not quite sure where this will go next. There’s a lot of just loose ends, which is great to keep going down but I’m interested to see what Brandon Sanderson has in store for Nowhere which I do believe is set for a Spring 2021 release.
4.25/5 Stars
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