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The Cruel Stars (The Cruel Stars, Book 1) by John Birmingham

Hits the ground running in a barrage of action & comedy. 💥🤣

I don't consider myself well-read. I never took any writing classes. I don't know what's needed to properly tell a story, build a world, or develop characters. But I know what I like, and that's action. Call me uncultured, call me a shallow reader, but I love it when a book takes me on an adventure at a million mph, and The Cruel Stars does that in spades. 👍

There are 6 different characters you follow, and the first 6 chapters are dedicated to introducing each character. After that, all hell breaks loose. And from that point on for about 50% of the book, it's constant action.

Now, when said hell breaks loose, it may cause some confusion for the reader (or at least it did for me). That's because there is no lead up, it happens almost instantly (damn near mid-sentence). Things start out normal, people going about their day, then suddenly gunfire, explosions, people trying to eat each other. It comes out of nowhere and almost makes you feel like you accidentally skipped a page or something. But it's okay, just roll with it. My thought is that this was intentional in order to give the reader the same sense of surprise and confusion as the characters.

But I do want to take a moment to mention, what I feel, is probably the books only downfall. It's that there are a lot of sci-fi words and acronyms that get thrown at you with no explanation as to what they mean. It often seems like your just expected to know, or you're left to figure it out through context. While the context does help, it felt like a sci-fi version of English slang: these aren’t real words, this isn’t a real sentence... but I know what you mean.

And finally, not only does this book have tons of action, it's also hilarious 🤣. McLennan's banter with his AI partner Hero (favorite character), Seph's "fuck it" attitude, and Booker's struggle of trying to find a new body; when there's no action, there's comedy. There's one part in particular, when the action subsides and the all protagonists finally meet each other for the first time, it's a laugh-out-loud collision of personality types.

I can't wait for the sequel. 😬