Megan E. O'Keefe's first space opera in the Devoured Worlds series presents failing worlds filled with conflict, shifting loyalties, pollution and destruction, and the beginnings of a lovely love story.
In the first book of Megan E. O'Keefe's Devoured Worlds series, The Blighted Stars, studious Tarquin Mercator is the unlikely heir to his ruthless father's galaxy-wide mining empire. Naira Sharp is a quick-minded spy and revolutionary who thinks she knows why newly discovered planets are being destroyed--and it all comes down to the greed of the Mercator family. Naira is determined to stop them.
Disguised as Tarquin's new bodyguard, Naira is celebrating her access to the Mercator family--until she and Tarquin realize they're stranded on a dead planet. Now they must rely on each other to survive--and together they stumble upon a widespread plot with corruption that spans the galaxy.
The premise of O'Keefe's imagined universe involves reprinting into new forms after they die, so that death is never definite. People can print into preferred forms or take on a new "print," so that impersonating others is possible, and when secretive plots are going on and characters are posing as members of the opposition, they must fall back on speech patterns, habits, or tics to identify each other.
Memories can be manipulated and erased, as characters' minds take the shape of a previous reboot and lose recent knowledge, affections, and loyalties.
Pollution and multiple worlds' destruction drives the plot, and various characters' belief in their own judicious use of technology and science to play God is as complicated and faulted as one could anticipate.
The love story emerges through difficult circumstances and is lovely, although in some ways it's still in its infancy at the end of the book. The love story is also far from the focus of the book. The tone of The Blighted Stars is a somewhat dark and horrifying space adventure, with moments of sweetness and levity. I was hooked on all of it.
O'Keefe creates a high-stakes, universe-spanning drama in The Blighted Stars, and it sets up complexities for the books to come in this series, which I definitely want to read.
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I listened to The Blighted Stars as an audiobook.
Megan E. O'Keefe is also the author of the The Protectorate series and The Scorched Continent series.
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