My Review
Last Star Burning was a book that I bought a while ago, but never picked up until now. It just sounded so amazing, and I fell in love with that gorgeous blue and silvery cover. The whole concept behind the book was something different, something that I really wanted to read and get into. I usually don’t read a first book in a series until I have all the books (I like to binge read so I don’t forget any details from one book to the next), but my back was acting up and I just wanted to read it.
Anyway, Last Star Burning is kind of a fantasy/dystopian with a female main character that has to deal with the fact that her mother pretty much destroyed their city by bringing a horrible sickness into their midst. While she was trying to find a cure, she also had infected her own daughter with the sickness.
“Sometimes memories tell us a story that fits what we think we know rather than the truth.”
Sev has had to deal with being marked as a criminal for years. Her mother, an infamous scientist who brought Sleeping Sickness into the city and infected Sev before trying to find a cure for it, is known for betraying her nation and those in it. She is kept in a permanent sleeping state, hovering in Traitor’s Arch, where everyone can see and remember what she had done.
Sev’s crime? Being her mother’s daughter. She is marked with a star burned into her hand, a star the tells everyone she is a criminal. While the rest of the city can socialize, be properly educated, and go about their lives, Sev has to do hard labor in a cannery and live in an orphanage, proving that she is worthy of being alive, instead of suffering a similar fate like her mother.
So when a bomb hits and Sev is being blamed, she takes off with the help of an unexpected ally, making her way to the mountains where the other outsiders live. Since Sev is infected with Sleeping Sickness, she needs to take Mantis on a regular basis. Mantis is a medication that the infected can take in order to keep any symptoms away.
So they make their way through the woods, coming across a family who seem questionable – and end up with the young girl accompanying them so she can get a better life.
Once they get to their destination, Sev learns some things about those she thought she could trust, and things take a big turn that she didn’t expect.
The ending of this book is quite the cliffhanger, and there’s a lot of plot twists near the end that I really didn’t see coming. It was interesting, but at the same time, it took me like two weeks to get through and I’m not sure why. I think it might have to do with the pacing – it was fast and hen slow and then it would speed up again, and I kind of found myself having a difficult time following the story.
Sev’s character was amazing – I really loved her and I felt that she was an amazingly written character with a lot to offer. She had to go through a lot and she didn’t come out flawless, which made her more relatable.
The whole premise of this book was really unique and I liked it – I haven’t read a good dystopian in quite some time so it was refreshing to pick one up. I liked how they had the whole class system going on.
Will I pick up the sequel? Yes, at some point, I would love to see what happens to Sev after that cliffhanger. I’m curious to see exactly what she’s going to go through. I’m not sure why I haven’t gotten to it just yet aside from the fact that I’ve been busy, but I will soon!
