Review: Stars and Smoke

Stars and Smoke by Marie Lu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It’s rare, I think, that I read a book by one of the best and most under appreciated writers in the business, Marie Lu, and I’m not super jazzed about what I’ve read. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Lu is still one of the best in the business for a verifiable ton of reasons, including her ability to write books that demand to be read in one sitting (as my old reviews of the Warcross duology can attest.) Stars and Smoke is, thankfully, no exception to that rule.

Unfortunately, while it’s also no exception to the rule that Lu has always been very good at writing interesting double romantic leads (June and Day being the primary example), this time, she really drops the ball with one half of the central pairing. Sydney Cossette, the youngest agent of Panacea (which may or may not be a CIA spinoff? Unclear.) She may be a certified ass kicker, but her character and personality are woefully half baked, to the point where I could barely root for her. And this comes from the same author who wrote Adelina Amouteru, a straight up “I support women’s rights…and women’s wrongs” villain protagonist. No, Sydney’s only points of development are that she’s annoyed with Winter (which means a weaksauce enemies to lovers dynamic ‘cause that’s all the rage nowadays) and that she’s got a weirdly non specific chronic respiratory problem that’s never clarified. Cystic fibrosis? Long Covid? Who knows, but I bet chronically ill disabled readers won’t particularly appreciate the paper thin representation.

Oddly enough, what I loved most about this book was Winter Young, our male lead. It says a lot that I could barely get into the international spycraft storyline (hell, the premise of Winter having to go through a crash course to get close to his fan and implicate her criminal shipping magnate father is all but irrelevant after a huge mid-book twist or two), but Winter’s creative side makes the book much more enjoyable for me. He’s a rather unusual blend of influences from various modern musicians - Lu is an unabashed member of the BTS Army, and Winter’s work takes some cues from K-pop as well, except he’s a solo act with bunches of backup dancers, and Chinese like Lu herself. (There are a couple of bilingual conversations between Winter and his mom, who hasn’t been there for him like she should have been, in part because both are still traumatized by the death of Winter’s older brother Artemis many years before.) His musical style blends elements of hip hop and Chinese classical, with the sensitive songwriting of Shawn Mendes. He tends to date around from girl to girl, but he’s also bisexual (he had a short relationship with his dancer Dameon, now platonic), which I appreciated a great deal, of course. Interestingly, though, Winter keeps it very much private that he and Dameon were ever an item - not necessarily for fear of reprisal from homophobes in the world, but because he’s just a private person overall, and again cementing his similarities to Shawn Mendes and Harry Styles, both of whom have been popularly assumed to be gay or bi and have refused to entertain such questions publicly, as is their right.

I’d honestly have liked this book more if it focused more on Winter, or if the spycraft side had had nearly as much development as the musical side. As it is, though, Lu seems to be planning this as the first of at least two books. And because it’s Lu, I’ll absolutely still read the sequels no matter what.

I just hope she doesn’t go back to the duology well like she’s been doing all the last six years or so, because that’s one trend that I’ve had enough of almost since it started.

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