Liquid Silver Books, $4.50, ISBN 978-1-59578-545-9
Fantasy Romance, 2009
In Michelle Lauren’s Starstruck: Hunter, I am introduced to a new concept: stars in the sky are actually sentient and you can actually zap them until they die squealing, using a gun you can hold in two hands, until you get enough energy to perform miracles like making someone live longer or look younger. Yes, stars.
Even better, those stars can assume the guise of hot babes. This is what our hero Noah Benson discovers when, in a convoluted plot to get back at the man who framed him for a stint in prison, accidentally zaps a star with his amazing new gun. Later that evening, he finds Miranda Snow, our star, floating facedown in the pool of his motel shortly after. Of course, we both know how she finds herself on Earth, don’t we? Miranda isn’t too unhappy to be here since she was this close to being married away to some guy she is not too keen off before she took a big one and fell down to this place.
The characters are actually quite likable – Miranda isn’t a wide-eyed child-like woman, much to my relief – but the story is a little too light on plot for my liking. But its biggest problem is the world-building. I have a very hard time reconciling the stars that we all know in real life with these creatures who are living… somewhere up there. How? Where? What? My initial guess will be that these people are probably living in a big spaceship, with the upper class folks living in the higher levels so high up that the normal folks consider those places the “sky”, but since the author directly mentions the sun and the moon as well, I’m really lost.
The author is very stingy with details when it comes to her setting. Usually, because this is a short story, such scarcity of details is understandable. But in Starstruck: Hunter, she is introducing a radical concept that is very different from what I, the reader, am familiar with. More explanation is necessary in this case since I spend most of my time wondering how is it that we get to have people living in the sky and being the stars to folks living on Earth.
Sometimes, I don’t get a story. In this case, however, I don’t see it.
