Scavenge the Stars was a little bit... meh for me. It's weird because I like the plot, the world is really cool, the characters were likeable, I didn't see the plot twist coming. But still. Meh.

So what's going on here?
Scavenge the Stars is a retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo (which I have never read or seen so that was entirely lost on me) following Amaya/Silverfish/Yamaa and Cayo as their lives become interwoven in ways that no one saw coming. Amaya, known as Silverfish on the debtor ship she was sold to seven years ago, rescues a man who promises riches beyond her wildest dreams. When her debt is paid up, she finds and strikes a deal with the man she saved; he'll help her get revenge on her tormentor, as long as she helps him take down the man behind the whole thing. And so she becomes the mysterious and wealthy Countess Yamaa, tasked with befriending the son of the villain in order to get at him. But, as Amaya and Cayo get to know each other, they quickly realize that they are falling for each other. What follows is a tangled web of lies, treachery, and a whole lot of danger all in the name of one thing: revenge.

What I loved
This world is super interesting. I do wish there had been some more world building, but I am happy with what we got. I usually find the political aspects in books to be pretty boring, but I was actually quite invested in this one and would love to see more of it in the next book. I'm interested in knowing the history of the empires and how things came to be what they are, and would also love more of their folklore and myths. The bits we got in this book were spectacular. I especially loved the little snippets at the start of each chapter.
I also quite liked the characters, for the most part. While I didn't feel particularly connected or emotionally invested in any of them, I did find them to be fairly well developed and interesting. My favourite character was definitely Amaya, I found her to be multifaceted and I was genuinely interested to see where her character was going to go. I liked the dynamic of her deciding who she wants to be and the kind of moral greyness surrounding that. The rest of the characters were all pretty well done too, but Amaya really hit the mark for me.

What I didn't love
It took me a long ass time to get into this book, and even by the end I still wasn't fully invested in the story. I was kind of sighing in relief when I hit the acknowledgments, glad that I finally finished it. I'm not entirely sure what it is that made me not like it as much as I thought I would, but there was just something about it that didn't fully grab my attention. Like the pacing was good, the plot was interesting enough, there wasn't anything particularly wrong with it, I just kept finding myself being bored. I was actually about to move it to my "finish later" shelf and start something else, but I went to the gym today and needed something to listen to while I did cardio, which is literally the only reason that I decided to push through and just finish it today. If not for that, it would have been moved to that shelf (which is basically a shelf where books go to die/eventually be moved to my "dnf" shelf). And the plot twist, while I genuinely didn't see it coming, I didn't really find it be all that impactful. Any of them actually, I just realized that there were technically a few plot twists lmfao. Yeah, I don't really know how to properly explain why I didn't care for this, I just didn't

Overall thoughts
I will definitely read the sequel (whenever that comes out, there's not even a release date yet RIP), but more so out of a feeling of obligation. If this was going to be a trilogy then no I wouldn't want to continue it. But for one more book I can do it