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.
This took me right back to my Roswell days – we have a waitress working at a themed diner (though it wasn’t alien themed, which was a bit of a disappointment, because that would have thematically hammered her over the head with the “it’s definitely not aliens” permise!) who doesn’t believe in aliens, but is working right alongside an alien hiding as a human bartender.
This was like Roswell meets Maximals when the robots come in (yes, there is enemy alien robot action!) which was a fun twist. I don’t read a lot of NA anymore because I don’t relate to the characters like I used to, but when a slow burn alien romance comes my way, I make an exception.
I like that there’s a clear vision in the writing and the author isn’t afraid to stick to it.
The FMC is super anxious and the overthinking definitely would have spoken to me once upon a time (at this age I just tend to inwardly sigh as the hunty in me gears up to impart some words of wisdom to a spiralling little wisp of a human before she implodes from the force of her own mind).
The writing has this perfectly early twenty-something voice that is full of pop culture references and cliché jokes – because at that age you’re still searching for who you are, what your voice sounds like, and you are SO influenced by the world around you. You haven’t yet learned to question the things fed to you so you end up sounding like you’re just regurgitating what you hear and see in your environment, and the writing really captures that.
The way the story sees the MC is a bit male gaze-y as the FMC repeatedly notices and admires his chiselled, 7-days-a-week-gym-rat physique and largely ignores his humanity to preserve her fantasy about him. Again, this can largely be chalked up to age – that’s how 20-somethings are. He’s also conveniently got a high-tech disguise that lets him look like that without actually spending 7 days a week at the gym, but I would have loved to seen more about him as a person than him as an object.
Stardusted isn’t as heavy on the alien-specific clichés as Roswell (but not as critical and exploratory as X-Files which was my mainstay rather than Roswell) and leans more towards small town adventure instead, just y’know, with alien robots tearing up the town instead of a stand-off at the town party planning committee.
The slow burn is appropriately slow without skipping ahead, but keep in mind this is single POV of the FMC and so leans more awkward angst than yearning since we don’t see the other side of the coin. The prose does lean really heavily into her overthinking and we spend pages and pages of her rehashing things in her mind without the story really progressing in any way – but I think this is true to the vision of who she is and I can see this appealing to habitual overthinkers almost paralysed by their own anxiety.
This is a book that would have been perfect for a younger me, when a straight up action romance would have whispered to my soul of a good time. This current iteration of me (soaked in espresso so dark it’s infernal) needs more grit and darkness in her fiction to be truly happy. Think Hunt the Stars, for instance, where the story has some really dark themes and the characters have a dark past that directly interferes with their relationship forming.
But don’t let my cynicism distract you from the fact that this story still has world-ending stakes and a more box office style action-adventure take on intragalactic conflict that echoes our own global political climate. It’s an ambitious debut with such big stakes – geopolitical problems on a galactic scale – and the relationship will continue to develop in the next book, because the most they do is kiss in this one.
“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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