A Sea of Stars

**An copy of this book was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review**

The good:

Decent prose. Nothing superb, but I couldn't really complain either. Additionally, some very neat ideas and imagery, especially as regards the constellations and the Memory Sea.


The bad:

- Basically, this suffered from zero explanation for the magic system/main driving force for the plot. The author literally doesn't even try. So there's this Memory Sea, where all these ships shipwrecked, and it's said that the sailors' memories filled the sea and now it's got memories in the water. But ALSO the water from the Memory Sea now has magical properties that people use for all sorts of things. And ALSO the memory water now holds not just the memories of the sailors, but also memories of all people. But why?? Well, I don't know. Characters just say "No one knows what it is", "No one knows why it does that", and "No one knows".


It's very frustrating.

- Emma is really dumb. Except for that one time when she has a actually smart idea at the end for getting her Mum back. But then proceeds to mess that up big time. But seriously, at the beginning of the book, she decides to turn on the Pyxis signal, letting everyone in the entire universe searching for it know where it is, even when she was told what that would entail and WARNED NOT TO DO IT.

-Now this isn't so much bad in above itself, but I'm sticking it here, because it annoyed me. 12-year olds, the target audience, might not mind this, (because when they imagine themselves on adventures, they act older than they really are) But the choices made by the kids in this book are totally unrealistic, as are how they respond to things. Sure, they make a lot of atrocious decisions, but they're very grown-up about it. Herbie reacts to events occurring fairly normally, but Emma reacts very oddly about half of the time to everything happening around her.

- This has some language randomly thrown in - "What the hell?", "ass", and "damn". But they're only used once, and it just felt like they shouldn't be there.


Full review to come later this week.