About the Book
Title: This Shattered World
Authors: Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner
Series: Starbound #2
Genre: YA Science Fiction
Pages: 394
Edition Read: Kindle eBook
Dates Read: April 10-17, 2025
Blurb: Jubilee Chase and Flynn Cormac should never have met.
Lee is captain of the forces sent to Avon to crush the terraformed planet’s rebellious colonists, but she has her own reasons for hating the insurgents.
Rebellion is in Flynn’s blood. Terraforming corporations make their fortune by recruiting colonists to make the inhospitable planets livable, with the promise of a better life for their children. But they never fulfilled their promise on Avon, and decades later, Flynn is leading the rebellion.
Desperate for any advantage in a bloody and unrelentingly war, Flynn does the only thing that makes sense when he and Lee cross paths: he returns to base with her as prisoner. But as his fellow rebels prepare to execute this tough-talking girl with nerves of steel, Flynn makes another choice that will change him forever. He and Lee escape the rebel base together, caught between two sides of a senseless war.
** MILD SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THESE BROKEN STARS **
Review
This is the first time, I think, that the second book in the series doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the first one. This is the case, at least at first, with this one. I was expecting for Tarver and Lilac’s story to continue, but now . . . who the heck is Jubilee and Flynn? Because of this, it took me a while to get into this one, but once I did . . . I enjoyed it even more than the first.
Jubilee is an amazing character. She is completely no nonsense, tough as nails, but deep down has a softness that you really have to investigate to find. She has also been through some pretty devastating trauma that still haunts her and definitely limits her ability to trust people. Flynn, on the other hand, is all about family. He comes from a group of people native to the planet (or as native as you can be to a terraformed place) that see Jubilee’s people as oppressors.
It seems impossible for these two people to ever be together, but hey, that’s what makes the story! On top of that, you have the weird things happening on the planet itself. This “Fury” thing that makes people get suddenly violent is something that Jubilee’s people fear and Flynn’s people don’t believe in. It’s a setting ripe with misunderstanding and tension.
It’s not until the end of the book that connections to the greater story line become clearer, find that this “Fury” may be connected to whatever the “whispers” were on the strange planet Lilac and Tarver crashed on. It’s a brilliant bait and switch, thinking we were dealing with two separate things. It makes the whole universe seem so much more rich and the stakes so much higher, setting up the climactic final book perfectly.
GoodReads rating: 4 stars
Categories: Books I've Read
Life With No Plot 
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