A review by allioth
Spirals of Stardust by Diane Jerome

adventurous emotional hopeful lighthearted fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5


The concept of this book is really interesting, and the world-building presented at the start is, needless to say, very creative.

It made me wish it stayed like that for the rest of the 130 pages.

The first thing that came to my attention was how confusing the demographic for this book is. The writing is straightforward, leaving no room for nuance, which in a kids' story is the standard. But then you have the sometimes hard-to-follow info-dumping, the footnotes, and the medical terms that make you doubt who this book was actually aimed at.

I like how it switches from third person to first person in the protagonist, Jill's, case. But otherwise, most of the other perspectives (such as Mike's) feel like pointless ramblings that lead to absolutely nothing. In any story, this would be bad, but it especially affects *Spirals of Stardust* due to its length.

All the things I previously mentioned are passable at best and annoying at worst. However, they didn't take much from my overall enjoyment as much as the simple fact that the core of this book, a dystopian world in the 23rd century where animals behave and take the place left by the long-extinct humans, is quickly forgotten in favor of a sweet but superficial lesson about how everyone is different and that they don't have to follow the same path to achieve what they want (and that alternative medicine is cool, I suppose).

Plenty more could've been achieved through the premise of this story (how certain animals feel being assigned a particular role they can't escape from, slightly touched on in one of Mike's aggravating POVs), but sadly that wasn't the case.

An overall "meh" book that could've done so much more if it only had time (and a clear idea of what it wanted to convey).

The ADHD representation was nice, though.