Their Fractured Light Review

This week's novel is Their Fractured Light, the last book in the Starbound trilogy by Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner.

Sophia, who left the haunted swamp planet of Avon in the last book, is now a con-artist with the aim of killing Roderick LaRoux for his crimes on Avon.  Gideon is the universe's best hacker.  They get thrown together, fall for each other, and then must overcome their mutual betrayal and distrust of each other to save the universe from LaRoux's evil plans.

This series has a structure that I've been seeing a lot lately where each book focuses on a different couple, adding characters and expanding the universe as it goes.  It's a good way to show different sides of an issue, different experiences in an expanded universe, and how far reaching one conspiracy can grow.  However, I have a couple problems with it. 

First, by the last book, when everyone's together, I'm overwhelmed with how many shmoopy couples are in the same room.  Even though I'm rooting for each of the couples, and I want to see them be schmoopy, all together it's a lot.  There are just so many straight people.

My other issue is that (and I think I've said this before) I loved Lilac and Tarver from the first book so much that I put off reading the second book, because I knew that the narrative turned away from them, and the thought of that made me sad.  I then loved Lee and Flynn from the second book and put this book off because the narrative turned away from them, even though Kaufman and Spooner have shown me that they'll make me love new people.  I'm a big, grumpy, stick in the mud, and I don't like change!  But then a weird thing happened. 

The weird thing is not that I loved Sophia and Gideon.  And I love Sophia and Gideon.  The first half of this story is a sexy spy-vs-spy where they're both keeping secrets and both have trust issues and are both using each other.  And there's this neat tension, where the reader (who is getting both Sophia's and Gideon's points of view) understands exactly how much they've hurt each other without even knowing it way before Gideon and Sophia figure it out.  So you're waiting in suspense for the last shoe to drop.  They have great chemistry and exciting escapes and it's fun in the way that satisfying heist stories tend to be.

The second half of this book draws the series to a close by bringing the other two couples onto the team.  And this is where the weird part is: I wanted them to go away so I could spend more time with Sophia and Gideon in their story.  Because it stopped being their story at that point and became an ensemble story, but at the same time it stuck with Sophia and Gideon's alternating points of view.  So a lot of the time I felt like other characters were having a more interesting character arc, but we could only see it from the outside.  So not only was Sophia and Gideon's story hijacked so we viewed a different narrative as outsiders (one where Sophia's skill set wasn't all that useful anymore) but the characters I loved didn't feel like they came back.  I wasn't in their head anymore the way I was when I fell in love with them.  They felt like they were passing through in a cameo appearance. 

I really have to hand it to Kaufman and Spooner.  They outdid themselves with lovable characters in every book in this series. 

***

Next week: Maplecroft, epistolary supernatural horror by Cherie Priest.