These Broken Stars Review

These Broken Stars

Authors: Amie Kaufman & Meagan Spooner

Publisher: Hyperion

Synopsis:

    The Icarus is a huge spaceliner traveling through hyperspace. Nothing could go wrong -- until it does. In a Titanic-like surprise crash, it crashes onto the nearest planet. No one survives, except Major Tarver Merendsen, a war hero, and Lilac LaRoux, daughter of the richest man in the universe. The planet is uninhabited by any people.

    Lilac and Tarver begin a long journey through the planet in search of some way to get help. They must trust each other or they will both die. But after a while, they begin to wonder: do they actually want to leave this planet?

    However, when they discover who is behind the whispering voices that plague their dreams --and even their waking moments-- Tarver and Lilac realize that they might leave the planet, but they will not be the same people who crash-landed with the Icarus.

My thoughts:

    This book started out a little slow, but it got better as it went on. No, this wasn't why I didn't like this book as much as I felt that I could have. The problem? The romance. Now, I don't refuse to read books with romance in them. I like reading books with romance. But the romance in this book felt so forced. Like maybe the authors were collaborating and went, "What genre is this going to be?"

    "YA."

    "Oh, better have Lilac and Tarver fall hopelessly in love! And better yet, make them star-crossed lovers! This is geared towards teenagers, after all!" NO. NO. NO. I feel like this decision to have the main characters in love made the story a whole lot worse than it could have been otherwise. It honestly felt like they hated each other, and then they did something that improved their prospect of survival, and then they were making out and passionately in love. I don't know, maybe if Tarver and Lilac's relationship was given more time to grow, I would have liked it. 

    In addition, reading this book made me realize something: I have yet to read a single YA book where the protagonists do not fall in love. If you have, great! But every single time I read a YA book the characters fall in love! Yes, I get that YA is geared towards teens/young adults and they oftentimes are in relationships, but that does not mean every teen is! Can't there be at least one book where the girl and the boy are just friends and there is no pressure on either of them from the other for their relationship to develop into anything other than platonic?

    Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars.