Joanne Rendell

Yes, Sky Without Stars is a retelling of Les Misérables set in space. Yes, it has your Jean Valjean, your Javert, your Marius, your Cosette, and your Eponine characters. Yes, it has an infamous criminal hiding from the police, a clueless adopted daughter, a member of the upper class questioning everything he knows about class, and a female street urchin caught up among all their stories. But what starts as a retelling becomes so much more.

What it becomes is a reminder of the power of the show more printed word. It is a call to remember history as accurately as possible because when you forget the past, you allow those who have not to gain control over you. It is the ease with which the monied exploit the poor and the many ways those in the middle ignore the exploitation. It is another example of how often history repeats itself without proper education and diligence.

It is a story about resources – people, money, food, and natural – and the dangers of having too much or too little. It is the lengths people will go to survive when desperate. It is the relationships that bind us to one another, whether we want them to do so or not. It is about secrets and political machinations that run deeper than anyone knows and the dangers of uncovering such plots.

Lastly, it is a space opera. Set in a different universe, on a plant that never sees the light of a sun, the permanent darkness plays a significant role in the mood of the people and the tone of the novel. Survival on a planet with limited resources is an aspect of the story that did not exist in the original. Nor did space travel, computer systems, embedded technology, androids, and other space elements. These add their own twist to the novel that makes it even larger and more spectacular than Hugo’s masterpiece.

Jessica Brody and Joanne Rendell do an excellent job taking Hugo’s story and making it their own. I like that they focus on the three younger characters rather than on the dynamic between hunter and hunted. I particularly like how they flesh out each of those characters, making them less insipid, more complex, more morally ambiguous, more human. I also enjoy how they downplayed the love story to focus on the political interplay. Best of all, by the time the novel ends, the story is heading in directions Hugo never went, making it original and providing enough unanswered questions to make anyone anticipate the sequel. show less

I couldn't make myself finish this book, but I gave it a fair chance, laboring through more than a hundred pages. I tried it because of its jacket copy mentioning Sylvia Plath and academia, but there's really precious little of either here. This is pure unadulterated chick lit, and not much more. It's Betty (Rachel) and Veronica (Diana) with Ph.D.'s, competing for the attention of an old-money Harvard-educated playboy-prof Reggie (Carson). Archie's probably in there somewhere too, maybe in show more the university computer geek, Mikey. The plot is just so high school Harlequin, however, that I couldn't stick with it.

Here's a sample of its chickie purple prose, from a passage where Diana has tried unsucessfully to end her friends with benefits relationship with Mikey -

"Diana looked into Mikey's face and scanned his dark eyes, which were somehow both lost and puppylike yet also reassuring and fearless, and couldn't bring herself to say the words. Each time, her desire took over. Her body yearned to be close to his, and inside she ached to have his soft voice near her ear and his lilting laugh in her bed."

And Diana is the one presented as the aloof sort, an "ice princess." Rachel's inner thoughts and roiling emotions are even purpler and blechh-ier than the above.

I don't think I'm a complete snob about popular women's fiction, because I have enjoyed numerous books by LaVyrle Spencer, Elizabeth Berg and others of their ilk in years past. But maybe I'm past that phase of my reading life. In any case, CROSSING WASHINGTON SQUARE is the stuff that Lifetime TV movies, and I'm sure plenty of women would/do love this book. As for me, despite its supposed trappings of academia and books, I just couldn't handle it. It's just too damn, well, high school all over again. show less

As good a finale to a trilogy as anyone could ask for with toe-curling action and suspense right up to the final page. Beginning it was like attending a tenth year reunion, sitting beside an old friend to awkwardly figure out how to reconnect, but finding just a few sentences were all that was necessary to make the two of you feel like no time had passed. That was how easily and fast I returned to the epic story completed here. An amazing read!

Wow, what a follow up to the first book! This one does not disappoint

One of my absolute favorite things in books is really well executed foreshadowing. It makes the reveals at the end so much more mindblowing when I realize how all the pieces fit together. This book has all of that, and it was so awesome

Marcellus remains the most irritating character, because he is so dumb and rash and can't act to save his life (literally). But he did have a really nice character arc and grow up since the show more beginning of the story. I look forward to this arc continuing in the next book.

Also, Alouette and Sparkles (if you know, you know) together are just an awesome power team. I loved the crew that formed in this book and it was exciting to see how things progressed.

I really felt like everything that could go wrong did in this book, and it hurts. But that's good I guess because I'm invested in the story

Only negative of this story is the cliff hanger ending. Argh. This book gets a slight pass because it really does feels like the trilogy is one big story that couldn't be told in one or two books, and they had to split it up somewhere show less