This Shattered World

Received from the publisher at BEA in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Cover image and summary from Goodreads:

The second installment in the epic Starbound trilogy introduces a new pair of star-crossed lovers on two sides of a bloody war.

Jubilee Chase and Flynn Cormac should never have met.

Lee is captain of the forces sent to Avon to crush the terraformed planet's rebellious colonists, but she has her own reasons for hating the insurgents.

Rebellion is in Flynn's blood. Terraforming corporations make their fortune by recruiting colonists to make the inhospitable planets livable, with the promise of a better life for their children. But they never fulfilled their promise on Avon, and decades later, Flynn is leading the rebellion.

Desperate for any advantage in a bloody and unrelentingly war, Flynn does the only thing that makes sense when he and Lee cross paths: he returns to base with her as prisoner. But as his fellow rebels prepare to execute this tough-talking girl with nerves of steel, Flynn makes another choice that will change him forever. He and Lee escape the rebel base together, caught between two sides of a senseless war.

I loved These Broken Stars, the first book in this series. I super duper loved it, so I was really excited to read this companion novel.

Knowing that this was a separate story from Lilac and Tarver’s, yet somehow connected, I was perhaps slow to get into this one, despite my initial enthusiasm. I think this is a case of me loving the previous book soooo much that it made it very difficult to read about characters who were not Lilac and Tarver. I liked the setting, and the characters of Jubilee and Flynn right away, but the plot was slow for me initially and dragged at times.

However, once I saw how Flynn and Jubilee’s story connected with Lilac and Tarver’s, things really picked up for me. I enjoyed the second half of the book so much more than the first, I think because I wanted to know what connected the two books and it took a while to get to that point. I am so looking forward to the third book, now that I’ve got a sense of the bigger picture!

While I didn’t love This Shattered World as much as I loved its predecessor, this was still a good sci-fi read with an awesome female character and a romance that I really liked. Recommended (but read These Broken Stars first!).