Defy the Stars

Claudia Gray
April 4, 2017
Paperback, 529 pp
Buy it from a local bookseller or find it here. 

World: Lightly sketched but full of conflict.  

Story:  Page-turning despite a thin plot at times.

Character:  Believable voices, engaging conflicts, sweet romance. 

X-Factor:  Nothing revolutionary here—but that’s not all bad. 

Familiar Story in Android Skin

[Wait, something about androids and spaceships on a fantasy blog? Occasionally we need to nod to space opera—fantasy’s lovechild with scifi—and Defy the Stars is the YA version. Skip if you’re luddite-only.]
 
Claudia Gray’s Defy the Stars opens with a bang: Noemi Vidal, war orphan on a rebel planet, watches helpless as her half-sister and only friend dies in the middle of an epic battle. And just as she’s about to kill one of androids Earth used to do it, the thing mentions there might be a way to save her planet from ever fighting Earth again.
 
Cut to the android’s perspective: special project of the genius whose androids changed the worlds, he has been locked in a disabled spaceship for thirty years, and out of sheer loneliness (the first of many emotions he learns to feel) takes an enemy soldier to be his new master.
 
From there the two embark on a dangerous and fast-paced mission through all four of Earth’s colony worlds to try to collect the pieces needed for the android’s plan. Along the way, they learn a lot about themselves, and each other, and end up forging a relationship despite differences in politics and prejudice.
 
Sound familiar? It is--Defy the Stars is a great YA space-opera romantic thriller, hitting all the right notes at exactly the right time. The fact that those notes form a familiar melody can be something of a detriment (can you think of another YA about an oppressed girl fighting for the freedom of her people in a hierarchical society who gets caught between love and war?), but only if you’re going into it looking for novelty. If you’re looking for the next fix in your Hunger Games-Divergent-Red Queen reading list, this book will do nicely.
 
That’s not to say there’s nothing original about it: Noemi’s home world is religious, and Gray actually has her character take religion and matters of faith seriously. Their intersection with politics and prejudice around the humanity of androids makes an illuminating backdrop for the more interesting of the two character journeys, the android’s coming to realize he can experience emotions, disagree with his masters, and ultimately that he has as much right to be called human as anyone else. While Trekkies will decry ‘Data! Data!’ for the first half of the book (especially if you listen to the audio, in which the male narrator goes a little too hard on the robot accent), Gray’s android goes further than that, and while the eventual romantic tone feels familiar, there’s a reason we return to the same themes. Sometimes you just want a beloved story in new skin.
 
Defy the Stars isn’t a perfect rendition, though—the last third of the story starts to feel a little forced, with characters meeting a little too coincidentally, taking risks they don’t seem totally motivated to, on a quest that feels forced for the sake of the romantic subplot. If you’re a plausibility hound, or need your characters to always do the smartest thing, you might get annoyed a few times toward the end. And for epic fantasy lovers, the worldbuilding might feel a little shallow, but in a book this short, with this quick a pacing (YA, in other words), you can’t ask for much more.
 
And for all the rest of you, who might enjoy a familiar romantic and rebellious story dressed up in shiny android skin, Defy the Stars is well-worth a plane ride read. 

A fantasy lover since Tolkien in third grade, Levi Jacobs has been published in several magazines, has an epic fantasy series forthcoming in 2019, and is at work on two more. Find him at www.levijacobs.com.