STARFLIGHT SERIES

His professor mom’s new tenure-track job transplants Norris mid–school year, and his biting wit and sarcasm are exposed through his cataloging of his new world in a field guide–style burn book. Norris Kaplan, the protagonist of Philippe’s debut novel, is a hypersweaty, uber-snarky black, Haitian, French-Canadian pushing to survive life in his new school. The less-imaginative end of outer-space adventure romance.Ī teenage, not-so-lonely loner endures the wilds of high school in Austin, Texas.

STARFLIGHT SERIES

For multiple narrators, creativity, and suspense in outer space, see Beth Revis’ Across the Universe series and Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner’s Starbound series instead. The protagonists are white their two brown-skinned shipmates (whose blond “dreadlocks” are mentioned again and again) are stereotypically angry. There are no nonhumans or extraterrestrials, and there is little science or technology beyond the outer-space premise.

Despite a far-future time frame and outer-space setting, Landers’ worldbuilding leans on such earthly details as rubber bands, Popsicle sticks, milled cider, funnel cake, and a barn dance with fiddles (on a distant planet). Enter Doran, her high school nemesis, “heir to the galaxy’s largest fuel corporation first-string varsity football star.” Glaringly visible genre tropes include the gruff, motley spaceship crew that becomes family the pirates and purposely brain-damaged torturers in pursuit the alternating-between-protagonists third-person narration and the enmity between Solara and Doran that will obviously turn to lust and love. She wants to turn her mechanical skills into a vehicle for self-sufficient life in the outer realm, but that’s far from Earth, so she needs someone to hire her for the trip and pay her passage. Solara has no family, no connections, and knuckle tattoos advertising her criminal record. A penniless girl and a wealthy boy, enemies, are stuck together on an outer-space journey.

Starflight