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leahbrarian 's review for:
Starworld
by Paula Garner, Audrey Coulthurst
I have to give this book credit for dealing with realistic issues including parental mental illness, adoption, and the mixture of love and stress that severe cognitively/intellectually atypical family members can bring, and doing it overall fairly well. However, I had some fairly major issues with the story.
First, the whole startalk texting style was so cringe-worthy, so mid-2000s Livejournal, that it made me absolutely want to die. I ended up skimming most of those chunks, which might be why every time these (allegedly high school aged???) girls talked about how meaningful Starworld was for them, how they loved slipping into this amazing, magical story they were creating together, it didn't ring true to me.
I also found Sam a really hard character to like. Whether it was due to taking care of her mother and hiding her increasingly troubling behaviors or because of the robot persona that she assigned herself, her standoffishness and awkwardness frequently didn't read as introverted or withdrawn, but instead really troubling for her as well. She had something of the "I'm not like everyone else, I'm SPECIAL" attitude that it pretty common in teenage protagonists, but her dismissal and judgement of basically everyone, including Kitty and Will's group of friends, just came off as mean. Scenes like the one where she was sitting with Will's friend group at lunch and just ended up silently making fun of things like how they chewed and ignoring questions about her favorite character from a certain TV show because she didn't have the emotional bandwidth to answer didn't show her in the best light. The fact that her chapters had to stand beside purposefully perfect Zoe's narration didn't do her any favors either.
I was pretty disappointed by the way a lot of the different plotlines wrapped up, too. There's one obvious thing: the romance plotline. I didn't like Sam enough to want there to be a romance between them, but I think I would be really disappointed if I had been misled by the promo materials in this respect. I didn't think that Zoe's whole pathological perfection issue was really solved, and the fact that after all that concern (and all the times that her parents apparently shut down discussion of her adoption) her mom is apparently totally chill about it seemed either too pat or too open-ended. I wish, too, that there had been some kind of wrapup/closure with Zoe's friends: half the time they seemed perfectly nice and, in fact, really attentive to someone who kept spending friend time texting someone else, and the other half they were heavy drinking Mean Girls who Zoe couldn't connect with and who made her uncomfortable. I felt like either their appearances in the narrative needed to be smoothed out, or there needed to be some conclusion.
There was something of a conclusion to the Sam's mom storyline, but the piece about her seeing a therapist was basically buried in a paragraph. Is the implication supposed to be that talking about her miscarriage was somehow cathartic for her and helped her begin to heal? Because if so that doesn't seem a particularly accurate portrayal of OCD - in my understanding, it can be escalated by a major life event, but was always going to present (based on factors such as genetics) and isn't helped by "getting over" the specific preceding trauma. It also didn't seem likely that she is so intensely overcome with her compulsions (counting, repetitive "checking" of doors and appliances, catastrophizing scenarios) that she has basically destroyed her home life, but that at work she is absolutely fine and no one has any idea that she might need help.
Might be worthwhile for a particular reader/type of reader, but I found the book had too many flaws to count myself among them.
Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.
First, the whole startalk texting style was so cringe-worthy, so mid-2000s Livejournal, that it made me absolutely want to die. I ended up skimming most of those chunks, which might be why every time these (allegedly high school aged???) girls talked about how meaningful Starworld was for them, how they loved slipping into this amazing, magical story they were creating together, it didn't ring true to me.
I also found Sam a really hard character to like. Whether it was due to taking care of her mother and hiding her increasingly troubling behaviors or because of the robot persona that she assigned herself, her standoffishness and awkwardness frequently didn't read as introverted or withdrawn, but instead really troubling for her as well. She had something of the "I'm not like everyone else, I'm SPECIAL" attitude that it pretty common in teenage protagonists, but her dismissal and judgement of basically everyone, including Kitty and Will's group of friends, just came off as mean. Scenes like the one where she was sitting with Will's friend group at lunch and just ended up silently making fun of things like how they chewed and ignoring questions about her favorite character from a certain TV show because she didn't have the emotional bandwidth to answer didn't show her in the best light. The fact that her chapters had to stand beside purposefully perfect Zoe's narration didn't do her any favors either.
I was pretty disappointed by the way a lot of the different plotlines wrapped up, too. There's one obvious thing: the romance plotline. I didn't like Sam enough to want there to be a romance between them, but I think I would be really disappointed if I had been misled by the promo materials in this respect. I didn't think that Zoe's whole pathological perfection issue was really solved, and the fact that after all that concern (and all the times that her parents apparently shut down discussion of her adoption) her mom is apparently totally chill about it seemed either too pat or too open-ended. I wish, too, that there had been some kind of wrapup/closure with Zoe's friends: half the time they seemed perfectly nice and, in fact, really attentive to someone who kept spending friend time texting someone else, and the other half they were heavy drinking Mean Girls who Zoe couldn't connect with and who made her uncomfortable. I felt like either their appearances in the narrative needed to be smoothed out, or there needed to be some conclusion.
There was something of a conclusion to the Sam's mom storyline, but the piece about her seeing a therapist was basically buried in a paragraph. Is the implication supposed to be that talking about her miscarriage was somehow cathartic for her and helped her begin to heal? Because if so that doesn't seem a particularly accurate portrayal of OCD - in my understanding, it can be escalated by a major life event, but was always going to present (based on factors such as genetics) and isn't helped by "getting over" the specific preceding trauma. It also didn't seem likely that she is so intensely overcome with her compulsions (counting, repetitive "checking" of doors and appliances, catastrophizing scenarios) that she has basically destroyed her home life, but that at work she is absolutely fine and no one has any idea that she might need help.
Might be worthwhile for a particular reader/type of reader, but I found the book had too many flaws to count myself among them.
Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.