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pagesofmaria13 's review for:
Scavenge the Stars
by Tara Sim
Technically, there was nothing wrong with this book. There was plot, good writing and the characters didn’t act like overgrown babies. However, I didn’t really enjoy it because I couldn’t connect to the characters, and I couldn’t entirely visualize them or the setting.
Descriptions are tricky. Give me too much and I’m tempted to skim ahead, but give me too little, and I don’t know what is going on half the time. In this book, I found myself leaning toward the latter. Some of the characters are described vaguely or not at all, so you only have a name floating on your page and no face to go with it. I found it particularly difficult to imagine the Water Bugs and Landless people that were with Amaya. Same goes for the setting.
There seemed to be many things happening, but not enough interactions amongst the characters to bring me to really care about them. The scenes between the two protagonists were nice to read, but they were too few, and the secondary characters felt more like they existed merely to move the plot of the main characters forward rather than to give life to the story. There’s a subtle difference between the two things that I’m not really sure I can convey, but long story short, there was nothing memorable about any of them.
We have two POVs: Amaya’s and Cayo’s. Between the two, I enjoyed Cayo’s a lot more. At least there seems to be some texture to the characters that surround him, and there are plenty more interactions in his chapters. The majority of the things we see in Amaya’s chapters are her own emotional turmoils and small flashback sequences with either her parents or her mentor, Boon, who is the only character in her chapters that I didn’t have too much of a problem identifying—and even then, there was nothing extremely special about him. The rest were a sequence of already forgotten names that I couldn’t match to a face or a personality.
I like plot, but if there isn’t a cast of characters equally compelling to go with it, then I’m not compelled to continue with the story. Three stars, because I can’t fault the writing or the plot, but the characters were not done the way I like them.
Descriptions are tricky. Give me too much and I’m tempted to skim ahead, but give me too little, and I don’t know what is going on half the time. In this book, I found myself leaning toward the latter. Some of the characters are described vaguely or not at all, so you only have a name floating on your page and no face to go with it. I found it particularly difficult to imagine the Water Bugs and Landless people that were with Amaya. Same goes for the setting.
There seemed to be many things happening, but not enough interactions amongst the characters to bring me to really care about them. The scenes between the two protagonists were nice to read, but they were too few, and the secondary characters felt more like they existed merely to move the plot of the main characters forward rather than to give life to the story. There’s a subtle difference between the two things that I’m not really sure I can convey, but long story short, there was nothing memorable about any of them.
We have two POVs: Amaya’s and Cayo’s. Between the two, I enjoyed Cayo’s a lot more. At least there seems to be some texture to the characters that surround him, and there are plenty more interactions in his chapters. The majority of the things we see in Amaya’s chapters are her own emotional turmoils and small flashback sequences with either her parents or her mentor, Boon, who is the only character in her chapters that I didn’t have too much of a problem identifying—and even then, there was nothing extremely special about him. The rest were a sequence of already forgotten names that I couldn’t match to a face or a personality.
I like plot, but if there isn’t a cast of characters equally compelling to go with it, then I’m not compelled to continue with the story. Three stars, because I can’t fault the writing or the plot, but the characters were not done the way I like them.