Star Wars: Lost Stars - Claudia Gray [Book Review]

Star Wars: Lost Stars (2015)
Author - Claudia Gray
Genre - Science Fiction

A tale of two lovers with allegiance to opposite sides in a seemingly endless war.

🌟🌟🌟🌟

Thane Kyrell is an upper class boy and Ciena Ree a rural villager from the backwater planet of Jelucan. They are united by their love of flying and joining the Imperial Navy. Everything is surreal until Thane, witnessing the myriad atrocities committed by the Empire - topmost of which was destruction of an entire planet, finally loses faith in the Empire and decides to defect from his post of Lieutenant in the Imperial Fleet to join the Rebel Alliance. Now witnessing the war from opposite sides, they are racked with constant fear of meeting each other in the battlefield, all along nursing their flaming love for each other.

The book was just amazing. Though I've not watched the original trilogy of Star Wars - the backdrop of Lost Stars, I still managed to get thorough enjoyment out of the book. This book, to me, gave me the exact feels when I watched The Force Awakens, the first of Star Wars movie that I watched. Though I'd still wish Star Wars would lose that elementary Dark-Light chasm shit and mix the whole thing into glorious shades of grey. (Can I be excused if I say I didn't intend it to come out this way?) But this book does tread a bit of my fantasy with one of the leads being a cynic and pointing out that people from both sides: the Rebels and the Empire considered themselves to be doing the right thing and the other trying to sabotage them.

Despite not being an avid Star Wars fan I finished reading the book in less than five days. I just couldn't put it down. I can't begin to imagine what it would be like to a fan of the franchise.

The Immortalists - Chloe Benjamin [Book Review]

Book - The Immortalists
Author - Chloe Benjamin
Genre - Literary Fiction
Year Published - 2018

Does knowing about your death change the way you live your life?

☆☆☆

The Immortalists regales the story of four siblings: Daniel, the stoic oldest brother; Klara, the rebellious magician; Simon, the repressed youngest child and Varya, the pragmatist who seek out a fortune teller in 1969 and the fortune teller tells the children individually the exact dates they are going to die. The novel follows the story of each sibling - with their wildly different personalities - how they live knowing full well exactly when they are going to die. The major question the novel asks is whether it was fate that led the children to their prophesied demise or did they self-fulfill the prophesy.
The story-telling is rivetting, all the Gold children are super interesting, their disparate goals and lifestyles fun to read about (except the death part). The book is divided into sections, each one following different siblings. The first section is about Simon, who is to die at the age of 22 according to the prophesy. He goes to California and decides to make some risky choices and later contracts AIDS because of them and meets his demise on the prophesied date. Likewise, the theme of whether they were destined to die or was is their choices that self-fulfilled the prophesy is recurrent with every sibling hereon after. Despite not believing the prophesy, it still affects how they live their lives.
The book is an easy read, the pacing quick, the premise interesting nothing I can complain about those though I still felt up until the last page that this book was going to give me an answer stringing the siblings' death together through something - be it science or the supernatural or something. I found the ending provided by the author very lacking and misleading altogether, especially after the first chapter about the gypsy seer.