About the Book
Title: The Stardust Grail
Author: Yume Kitasei
Series: none
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 312
Edition Read: Hardcover
Dates Read: July 2024
Blurb: Save one world. Doom her own.
From the acclaimed author of The Deep Sky comes a thrilling anti-colonial space heist to save an alien civilization.
Maya Hoshimoto was once the best art thief in the galaxy. For ten years, she returned stolen artifacts to alien civilizations—until a disastrous job forced her into hiding. Now she just wants to enjoy a quiet life as a graduate student of anthropology, but she’s haunted by persistent and disturbing visions of the future.
Then an old friend comes to her with a job she can’t refuse: find a powerful object that could save an alien species from extinction. Except no one has seen it in living memory, and they aren’t the only ones hunting for it.
Maya sets out on a breakneck quest through a universe teeming with strange life and ancient ruins. But the farther she goes, the more her visions cast a dark shadow over her team of friends new and old. Someone will betray her along the way. Worse yet, in choosing to save one species, she may condemn humanity and Earth itself.
Review
This book was so much fun! I don’t read a lot of science fiction, although whenever I do, I almost always enjoy it. I should probably read more of it. I hadn’t heard of this book or this author. It was the July pick for Ezeekat’s Book Club over on Fable and I am so glad I got to read it. It’s definitely sci fi, but it’s also kind of a heist story, searching for historical information and trying to find artifacts. To me, it felt a little bit like Indiana Jones, but in space. It was definitely an exciting ride and there was always something new to uncover.
One thing that Kitasei does really well was describing the alien species. This is always something I have trouble with when reading sci fi, and that’s trying to picture something that is so different from humans. We get to spend a lot of time with a Frenro, which is an aquatic species that looks sort of like a large octopus? Kind of? It’s the closest thing to what my feeble human brain could compare it to. It’s name is Auncle and it is Maya’s best friend. Auncle uses different pronouns (xe/xyr) which took me a while to get used to, but was a really good way to set Auncle apart from the humans in the story.
There’s a lot of really cool tech in this story, which is expected in a sci fi novel, and this one definitely didn’t disappoint. For example, Auncle has a space ship. Since Auncle is an aquatic being, part of the space ship is full of water. There is a section that has been made habitable for humans and there is an airlock mechanism that allows it to fill with water if Auncle wants to come in there. Maya has a suit that let’s her breathe in water, so in this way, the two of them can share a space ship while having their own environments, but also being able to exist within each other’s space. So cool!
The only reason this didn’t get a full five stars from me is because I did occasionally have a hard time following some of what was happening, especially when they started talking about the new interstellar government body/thing. I don’t think I ever fully understood how all of that worked, but that was probably just because me and my brain are slow sometimes. It did take me out of the story occasionally, but that could have been on me and not on the story itself.
GoodReads rating: 4 stars
Categories: Books I've Read
Life With No Plot 
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