4.5 stars
I love Jane Austen, and I am a total sucker for books inspired by Jane Austen's work. Unfortunately, there are far too many sub-par books that come out every year that are just poor imitations of Jane Austen. Fortunately, For Darkness Shows the Stars is not one of those. It took the basic premise of Persuasion (my second favorite Austen novel, right behind P&P) and adapted it in a really wonderful way.

The story is about Elliot North, a young woman who lives with her father and sister on a plantation. She had a longtime friendship and eventually a romance with a worker on the plantation named Kai. The people working on the plantation are descended from people who had been genetically altered in the past. It was supposed to make people highly intelligent and aware, but it ended up backfiring and creating what they call 'Reduced' people. The Reduced are thought to be very simple-minded, only able to perform menial tasks that don't require any higher-level thinking. As new generations are born, more and more Reduced people are having children that have no mental deficiencies. These people are called Posts (for Post-Reductionists) and they have started running away from their masters to seek a better life. Kai decides to leave and wants Elliot to go with him, but she feels that the other people still on the farm need her and she refuses to go. Four years later, he comes back into her life a wealthy and successful ship-builder and that's where the story begins. I don't want to give too much away so that's all I'm going to say about the plot.

The characters are complex, flawed, and believable; that includes the many side characters. Perhaps the only character I really had trouble with was Elliot's father. He was just evil because...reasons. I felt as though he was slightly one-dimensional. But in comparing him to his Persuasion counterpart I felt like the author actually did a very good job taking the selfish, ignorant, pompous, pretentious, snobby father and raising the stakes by making him dangerous rather than indifferent.

I love the relationship between Elliot and Kai. Their early relationship is told through letters they send each other, which I love considering the importance of letters in Austen's writing. I love that they are always candid with each other in those letters, and his last letter to her...it's everything you want from a Persuasion re-imagining. I also liked that there was a good deal of interaction between them. Persuasion is such a good book if you like a slow burn romance. But there is a part of me that always wished we'd had a few more conversations between Anne and Wentworth. This book delivered those interactions without taking away the slow burn aspect of this story.

As for the world-building, I thought it was decent, but not spectacular. It takes place on an island...somewhere. They mention names like Einstein, Curie, and Tesla, so it's obviously supposed to be on Earth at some point in the future, but other than that, we are left with few clues as to when/where this story is set.

All in all, I thought this was a wonderfully rich and entertaining book. I heartily recommend it for anyone who loves Jane Austen.