Starflight (Review)

Starflight by Melissa Landers
Series: Starflight #1
Genre: Young Adult/Science Fiction
Page Length: 369 pages
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion

About Starflight (via Goodreads):

Life in the outer realm is a lawless, dirty, hard existence, and Solara Brooks is hungry for it. Just out of the orphanage, she needs a fresh start in a place where nobody cares about the engine grease beneath her fingernails or the felony tattoos across her knuckles. She's so desperate to reach the realm that she's willing to indenture herself to Doran Spaulding, the rich and popular quarterback who made her life miserable all through high school, in exchange for passage aboard the spaceliner Zenith. When a twist of fate lands them instead on the Banshee, a vessel of dubious repute, Doran learns he's been framed on Earth for conspiracy. As he pursues a set of mysterious coordinates rumored to hold the key to clearing his name, he and Solara must get past their enmity to work together and evade those out for their arrest. Life on the Banshee may be tumultuous, but as Solara and Doran are forced to question everything they once believed about their world—and each other—the ship becomes home, and the eccentric crew family. But what Solara and Doran discover on the mysterious Planet X has the power to not only alter their lives, but the existence of everyone in the universe...

I think the best way to describe my thoughts about this book are "GUYS, THERE ARE SPACE PIRATES IN THIS NOVEL."

But on a serious note, I am not really sure what I expected out of this novel.  Everything surprised me, in a good way!  The galaxies and just the overall world that Landers had constructed in Starflight are of the highest standard; it was expansive, imaginative, colorful, and an overall joy to read about.  It was the perfect backdrop to this surprisingly layered and complex story about a ragtag group of misfits finding a family with each other.

I love YA books that try to incorporate other sub-genres into their novel, and Starflight is a great example of how it incorporated space opera along with their heavy sci-fi in this novel.  The book had this epic, grandiose feel to it, and you could feel the weight of time passing with each segment of the novel.  I've already gushed about the world of Starflight, its visuals, its creativity, and its coolness (again, SPACE PIRATES.  WHAT).  The characters of Starflight felt like they were pulled out of a short yet stellar sci-fi TV show, and all stood out on their own while simultaneously working well together.  You could start to see the bond of the crew form within each moment of time you see them on the Banshee.  And at the same time, Starflight felt really accessible and enjoyable with Landers' writing and her characters guiding me on the right path through the vast unknown of space.
Landers’ 3rd person writing had this awe-like wonder for the world around it, and Landers’ love for it only spread out even further to the audience.  Every new planet they travelled by or landed on felt important and special, and Landers did a great job of fleshing everything out to truly build the galaxy around her.  When I was reading Starflight, I felt like a kid in her universe, looking up at the huge world around me that Landers has written about, building up my dreams to one day take a spaceship and sail to every nook and cranny of the universe that Landers had written about.

Additionally, she also did a great job utilizing the 3rd person writing to convey the wider atmosphere of Solara and Doran’s thoughts.  When she first switched perspectives, I was a little confused and taken out for a bit, but intrigued.  Now I think that the whole story would have been much poorer if she stuck with a double first person narrative.  The greatest thing about this technique was that she could show all of Solara and Doran’s flaws.  One of the best things about the two protagonists was that they were simply not perfect.  They started off - and had to resort to being - pretty bad people.  But they grow throughout the novel in a very organic way filled with dry humor and wit that charms the readers.  While their relationship did end in a cliche way, Landers eased this in with a sense of anticipation built up from the readers to deliver an emotional but tried-and-true payoff.

My other complaints with the novel were more nitpicky; otherwise, reading this novel was an absolute adventure from start to finish.  It was tragic and uplifting at once, hyper-funny and super serious, and a great roller coaster read if you're really looking for something fun.

MY RATING: 3.5 STARS