Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
Hunt the Stars by Jessie Mihalik ticks all the boxes for me: ex-mil characters, slow burn romance with some spice and lots of action.
Went in pretty blind because I just wanted to read sci-fi in November (since my own book was coming out and my birthday is in November + this was my second birthday month release!) and found I was not disappointed.
This book is part of the Starlight’s Shadow series, where we get one couple per book. Whether or not this qualifies as a proper slow burn is debatable (mostly by me, because I like multi-book arcs), but this is far from instalust.
The main characters (actually all characters?) are both ex-military, and in this specific coupling we have high-ranking commanders from opposing sides of the war. There’s a mysterious job which turns into a kidnapping, and both sides are plenty wary of each other.
The pacing dragged its feet a bit and we spend a lot of time going through Management 101 with the FMC as she cooks and takes care of her crew. This is fine if you’re into that kind of thing, I just found it mostly boring because I don’t really go to fiction for cosy that often (and even when I do, not this kind of cosy). So, there really is a lot of care-taking fantasy fulfilment in this book which will be exactly what some other readers are gonna love.
The romance takes a long time to develop and when things finally start happening we’re around the 80% mark, so if you don’t like the slow build, skip this. Once we get into it, it was nice to see how these former enemies slowly start trusting each other – however for having SUCH a heavy history together (before the events in this book) I would have loved nothing more than several books to dig into all of that.
But this is more formulaic – possibly because it’s under contract to a trad publisher – and is expected to deliver on a per book basis (because if it was sold as a trilogy, it’s then pigeonholed into delivering those arcs in a trilogy).
The steamy/spicy scenes (the few) were fun, but the prose in them had me searching for my 80s clinch covers as suddenly, the language took on some archaic tones.
While this is an alien romance, the aliens look human with a few distinct changes – such as the eyes and the fact that the men in this series are telekinetic/telepathic. But, in my books, you can never, ever go wrong with a swoony alien commander 👀👀👀 so I’m not complaining.
Overall the relationship of the couple went from enemies to room mates a lot quicker than my demisexual arse likes things to progress, but plot contrivance forces a free pass on that one because to conform to the formula it has to be wrapped up by the end of the book.
The action was really fun to read, and I always love those moments when the whole crew gets to work together and really shine – in this case both crews were forced to work together while still learning to trust each other and that was so fun.
I listened to the audio book and felt like the narrator didn’t suit the FMC very well, I would have loved for her to have a voice that sounded older (I was dreaming of Jennifer Hale or similar, iykyk) I feel like this narrator suited the FMC in book 2 of the series better (which I started right after this one but kind of bored while reading and haven’t officially DNF’d but kind of just… I’m letting it rest, mkay? 😅)
“When Sasha Barrett gets bitten by a snake on a mission, her squad captain’s quick actions not only save her life, but also make her realise something she may have known all along…“
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