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A review by prijks
The Actual Star by Monica Byrne
challenging
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Maybe I’m just not the right audience for this book. It is clear that a lot of thought and research went into it and I felt compelled enough to read it through to the end. But the end felt like a letdown to me and the fate of the few characters I felt sympathetic towards was left untold.
I’m going to put my remaining thoughts in two separate spoiler tags. The first is not-really spoilers but I’ll err on the side of caution and the second is real spoilers
Not-really spoilers:
I feel like this book ends with ambiguity as to what actually happened. Maybe that works for some people. It bothered me. I also had a hard time suspending disbelief in the future timeline. Finally, while I was able to understand most of the passages in Kriol, it slowed me down significantly and I just found it off-putting to be asked to read pages and pages of it.
This next spoiler gives away major plot points:
Leah, we are led to believe, has a terminal brain tumor. So is her experience at the end just the hallucinations of a dying brain or her true experience? The way it is written I can’t tell. I can interpret it as being either. But then how does that relate to other people’s current and former lives intertwining and leaking into each other, since the story is not a first-person narrative? Given how many people love this book I feel like I must be missing something, but that just makes it more frustrating…
Also, we are shown that the disappearances that happened with some regularity were real since there was video evidence of them. Yet Leah’s disappearance is then hinted to have just been her finding her way deeper into the cave than anyone could search for her. So what caused the other disappearances? So many plot points left unresolved…
In the end, I don’t regret having read it but I also can’t really recommend it either.
I’m going to put my remaining thoughts in two separate spoiler tags. The first is not-really spoilers but I’ll err on the side of caution and the second is real spoilers
Not-really spoilers:
This next spoiler gives away major plot points:
Leah, we are led to believe, has a terminal brain tumor. So is her experience at the end just the hallucinations of a dying brain or her true experience? The way it is written I can’t tell. I can interpret it as being either. But then how does that relate to other people’s current and former lives intertwining and leaking into each other, since the story is not a first-person narrative? Given how many people love this book I feel like I must be missing something, but that just makes it more frustrating…
Also, we are shown that the disappearances that happened with some regularity were real since there was video evidence of them. Yet Leah’s disappearance is then hinted to have just been her finding her way deeper into the cave than anyone could search for her. So what caused the other disappearances? So many plot points left unresolved…
In the end, I don’t regret having read it but I also can’t really recommend it either.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Incest and Self harm