Book Review

At Star’s End by Anna Hackett

Oh, dear.  At Star’s End has so much promise, but it ends up being so haphazard that it might as well have been constructed by sticking random Legos together. And not in a good way.

The premise of this novella is pure CarrieS crack. Dr. Eos Rai is trying to find the Mona Lisa, which is said to have been destroyed with the fall of Earth. She turns to a group of treasure hunting brothers for help and of course she and one of the brothers, Dathan, fall madly in love. He’s an Indiana Jones type who is free and unfettered and out for a dollar while she is all about civic responsibility. They meet while he’s in the shower on his spaceship. Will sparks fly? Will CarrieS get all excited about treasure hunting in Space? Will there be Space pirates and booby traps and maps? Yes, Yes, and Yes.

The first half of the story is pure, predictable fun. The writing is fluent. The characters are basic character types as opposed to fully rounded people, but who doesn’t want to spend more time with the “Indiana Jones” type? Sometimes I’m perfectly happy to kick back, relax, and watch a bunch of treasure hunters fly a spaceship and engage in repartee. Its not groundbreaking literature, but it promises fun and it delivers.

But halfway through the book, everything falls apart. The first sign of disaster is that Eos is kidnapped by slavers. She’s stripped, threatened, and sold at auction. So now the story is not fun – it’s gross and scary and disturbing. When Devon shows up to rescue Eos, the characterization starts going all the heck over the place. On the one hand, he’s wonderfully supportive – he comforts her, tells her to expect nightmares for a while, and has a bath with real water and a scent from her homeland waiting for her on his ship because he knows she’ll want that. On the other hand, when he helps her take off her slave collar, he says, and I quote,

“Would it be so bad to belong to a man?”

Let me help you out there, Dev. YES. YES IT WOULD. You could not be more gross and skeevy if you tried. Gross, gross, gross. The context is that Devon and Eos had a previous conversation in which he tells her that on his world concubines wear a torq that marks them as belonging to a particular man. Eos replies, “If he truly cherished her, she wouldn’t mind wearing his claim,” When Devon brings up the matter while removing the slave collar, she says she doesn’t want to be a possession. I can’t tell whether this is character inconsistency or character growth, but in both cases the conversation is completely disgusting. In case you can’t tell, I have a problem with the concept of a person being the property of another person in any sense. And what could possibly posses Devon to ask Eos that question while he’s removing her chains from slavery? iPad, meet wall – no wait, that iPad is really expensive.

From this point, the characters just keep acting completely bizarre – not offensive, but inconsistent. In some scenes Devon tries to convince Eos to have a sexual relationship with him and then he’s all, “No, she doesn’t really want me”, and then never mind, he’s totally into having sex. There’s some clever booby traps of the Indiana Jones variety, and Devon is clever about figuring out when Eos is a hologram.

But in a 134-page book, Eos is kidnapped three times, which drove me bonkers. Devon and Eos do have a great conversation about their issues regarding their parents, and a great fight in which Eos diffuses the whole thing by saying, “I’m wrong” to Devon’s complete astonishment. There’s some excellent moments between these two when they come across as people, but they are sadly undercut by all the other moments when they act inconsistent.

This book never felt like a cohesive story. It was more like a collection of elements shoehorned together without regard for whether they actually fit. Some of the elements are annoying, some are fun, but they’re all completely random. It’s a collection of random tropes and I had nothing to get invested in.

Incidentally, the cover art is really gorgeous except that the heroine is pouting and the hero looks bored (he also looks suspiciously like Shia LaBeouf, the least sexy man in the universe). I wish this cover had just left the people off – the Mona Lisa combined with the futuristic elements is much more striking than most covers are.

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At Star’s End by Anna Hackett

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  1. Vicki says:

    Yeah, I agree about the cover. I was reading the words “wild and unfettered” in your review and looking at the cover thinking, yeah, right. He looks like a puppy dog. In which case, “wild and unfettered” would mean, at least in my experience, “not housebroken.”

  2. Jace says:

    Shia LaBeouf, the least sexy man in the universe

    Well played.

    Were they trying to recreate the Star Wars poster with that cover???

  3. lisa says:

    +1 from another SFR fan. I hated the slaver plotline. It was so gratuitous and offensive. Then the heroine is rescued and nobody gives a thought to the other slaves. Fail.

  4. eugenia says:

    So glad I wasn’t the only one flashing back to the Attack of the Clones poster…..

  5. Amanda says:

    Is the hero Dathan or Devon?

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