The Stardust Grail
By Yume Kitasei
Published by: Flatiron Books
Publish Date: 6/11/24
I won’t bury the lead: I haven’t had this much fun with sci-fi in a while.
When it comes to sci-fi, I mostly consume it via movies and TV. I’m a huge Star Trek fan and a Star Wars fan to a lesser extent. I love my sci-fi mixed with horror à la The X-Files and The Twilight Zone. I also get a kick out of Rick and Morty, Back to the Future, and a bunch of other sci-fi films and TV shows. But, when it comes to reading, my consumption of the genre is mostly limited to novels set in the world of Star Trek and the military/horror/sci-fi Joe Ledger series by Jonathan Maberry.
Looking at my taste, however, it’s not surprising I enjoyed The Stardust Grail as much as I did. It’s not just a sci-fi novel. If I had to best describe this book, it’s Star Trek meets Star Wars meets the Indiana Jones franchise meets Ocean’s Eleven. This book has it all: action, adventure, space travel, alien species, and heists.
The story centers on Maya Hoshimoto, a young woman who group up on a human colony on a distant planet who was once the greatest thief in the galaxy. Maya has given up crime to move to Earth and study at university. But when her former partner, Auncle, a member of the alien species called the Frenro, shows up at Earth to enlist Maya’s help in getting back The Grail, a lost Frenro artifact that can save the species from extinction, Maya is pulled back in for one last job.
But wait! There’s more! The Frenro were once responsible for the building of the Intergalactic Web, a series of portals that makes space travel possible. Turns out, The Grail also helps them build those portals. And something is destroying the portals, threatening to cut humanity off from the rest of the galaxy. So, not only has Auncle asked Maya to help find The Grail, so has the Earth military, who want to keep the Grail themselves.
Besides the action and adventure, I really appreciated the depiction of Maya and Auncle’s friendship. The Frenro are one of the most alien extraterrestrial species I have seen depicted in a while. They aren’t humanoid. They have a very different society and culture than humans. One of the things I found interesting was the cross-species relationship, which was close and loving, but also difficult because of the differences.
The pace of the book is almost non-stop. Kitasei takes just the right amount of time to slow down for character moments to build the reader’s connection to the characters and their relationships to each other, but is quick to get back to the action. There are plenty of twists and surprises along the way as well, meaning the book never feels predictable.
While I am on the subject of twists and surprises, there is just one near the end that I didn’t like. It was a real “wait, what? Really?” moment. The good news is, it didn’t even put a dent in my overall enjoyment of the book. Neither did the very ending, which was very abrupt. I got to the last sentence and felt like there would be more, but there I was at the end. It threw me for a second.
I said it at the top of this review and I’ll repeat it here: this book is a blast. I didn’t want to put it down, even when I knew I had to get some sleep because I had to wake up early for work. Be sure to pick this one up when it comes out.