First Look: Star Angel: Awakening

A girl sits on a backyard swing set the evening before high school starts, pumping higher, watching the light go orange over a valley in Idaho. Her best friend is flirting in the grass behind her. She is trying not to care about that. It is an ordinary, well observed, slightly lonely scene, and it would be a perfectly good way to open a quiet contemporary novel about starting over in a new town.

Except that Star Angel: Awakening has already shown you something else.

Before Idaho, the book puts you on a world called Anitra, a hundred floors up, in the hands of a soldier named Horus who has just committed the highest heresy his people recognize. He has stolen the Holy Icon from the tomb of a dead emperor, and he intends to hand it to the enemy, and he believes he is right to do it. Below him two armies burn the horizon. He steps off the tower. Things go badly.

So when a white hot object comes out of a cloudless sky and punches through the forest canopy behind Jessica's house, the reader knows exactly one thing more than she does. That gap is the whole engine of this opening, and it is a good one.

A protagonist who moves

What makes the first chapters work is that Jess runs toward it.

That sounds small. It is not. A great many openings in this shape give you a watchful, observant narrator who has interesting thoughts and waits for the plot to arrive. Jess has the interesting thoughts, and then she is already halfway down the hill while her friend is still yelling at her to wait. She goes into the dark woods. She finds what fell. When it turns out to be breathing, she stays.

She also refuses to hand the problem to an adult, and the book gives her a real reason rather than a convenient one. She has seen enough television to know how this goes: tell someone and they call people in vans, and the person she found gets taken somewhere and so, probably, does she. You can disagree with her, but you understand her, and that is the difference between a character deciding something and an author needing something decided.

What follows is the most purely enjoyable stretch of the opening: a teenage girl with a very large problem in the woods, trying to buy men's clothes at a mall, at speed, with a skeptical older sister waiting at the curb, while inventing a fictional boyfriend for a helpful clerk. "Soccer," she says, when asked what he is into. "And swimming. Diving, actually. The High Dive." It keeps going. It is very funny, and it is funny in a way that comes out of who she is rather than out of jokes dropped on top of her.

A friendship with real weight

Bianca Devnani arrives looking like a type, the gorgeous best friend who thinks about boys and worries about her hair, and the book seems ready to let Jess roll her eyes at her for three hundred pages.

It does not. Jess catches herself: "Maybe I am jealous." And then, plainly, the narration puts its cards down about what Bianca actually is. She was the one who welcomed Jess when she arrived in a new state knowing no one. She is the reason Jess has a life in Boise at all.

She is also, when it counts, terrified out of her mind and still there. She screams, she bolts, she comes back. She stands in a dark wood arguing with her friend about whether this is insane, which it is, and then she goes to the mall covered in grass stains to help anyway. A first act that bothers to make the sidekick a person is a first act paying attention.

The writing

The prose is energetic and highly visual, and it can do two very different registers. The prologue is legible action, which is harder than it looks: a man falling, leaping, being shot at, across an unfamiliar city, and you always know where he is and what he wants. The Idaho chapters move on voice instead, close to Jess, dry and self-aware, with her thoughts breaking in as she talks herself into and out of things.

Anitra gets sketched rather than explained. Names and factions and a Dominion and a Holy Emperor come at you fast in the prologue, but each one is pinned to an image or an action, so it reads as a world glimpsed in motion rather than a lesson. The mystery feels intentional. You are not confused, you are curious, and those are not the same thing.

The style has a signature: short paragraphs, fragments for emphasis, and stylized sound effects rendered right on the page. It gives the action a kinetic, almost illustrated quality. Readers who like their prose spare and unadorned may find it busy. Readers who want momentum will find it moves.

Who this is for

This is young adult science fiction for readers who want a big galactic premise delivered through a small, specific, grounded life. If the appeal of an opening like this is watching an ordinary person's ordinary evening get permanently interrupted, this does that cleanly and with humor.

The verdict

Star Angel: Awakening earns a First Look because its opening makes a specific promise rather than a vague one. It is not simply that something strange has happened to a girl in Idaho. The reader has already seen the larger conflict surrounding what fell, while Jess has only begun to understand the danger. That dramatic irony gives her curiosity real weight.

Add a protagonist who makes decisions, a friendship with real affection in it, and an author who can write both a plasma barrage and a mall clerk with equal confidence, and the result is an opening that does the one thing an opening has to do. At the end of the fourth chapter, two girls are in a fast car heading home in the dark, and there is someone waiting for them in the woods.

You want to know what happens when they get there.

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This First Look is based on the prologue, the first four chapters, and a limited examination of the final chapter. It evaluates the book's opening promise and reader appeal rather than the complete novel.