Review: The Second Star

The Second Star by Alma Alexander
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have liked several of this author's YA books, but this (coincidentally or not, not YA) I didn't much care for.

There was a lack of clarity and momentum to the plot, because it kept swapping around story goals. Each goal was in itself compelling for the protagonist, but there was no real throughline.

Christianity (Catholicism) comes into the story, but the research is not there. Jesuits are clerics regular, not monks (which is fairly well known, I thought), and the magi, despite what your Christmas cards may have told you, were not kings, quite probably were not three in number, and did not attend the birth of Christ.

The world of 200 years from now felt much, much too similar to today. Despite a great deal being made of how people from shortly after our time would not have been able to cope with all the changes, we weren't shown very many changes at all. Cellphones, for example, are still around, and in people's pockets, not (for example) installed in their heads; new versions come out periodically, and old technology may or may not be compatible with new, and yet how they work and what they do is indistinguishable from how they work and what they do today.

I was not a fan of the big reveal, either, and it came out of nowhere late in the book.

There was one good feature, which was the psychologist protagonist's powerful commitment to the wellbeing and just treatment of her patients. If it had been coupled with better decision-making on her part, I would have liked her even more.

As it was, this was not a book I much enjoyed, and if it had been the first I'd read from the author I probably wouldn't read another. It's not representative of her other work, though, so I will keep picking up her books - but with more caution in the future.

I received a review copy via Netgalley.

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