Review: This Shattered World – Amie Kaufmann and Meagan Spooner

*I received a free copy of This Shattered World from Disney Hyperion via Netgalley. This has in no way influenced my voluntary review, which is honest and unbiased *

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Jubilee Chase and Flynn Cormac should never have met.

Lee is captain of the forces sent to Avon to crush the terraformed planet's rebellious colonists, but she has her own reasons for hating the insurgents.

Rebellion is in Flynn's blood. Terraforming corporations make their fortune by recruiting colonists to make the inhospitable planets livable, with the promise of a better life for their children. But they never fulfilled their promise on Avon, and decades later, Flynn is leading the rebellion.

Desperate for any advantage in a bloody and unrelentingly war, Flynn does the only thing that makes sense when he and Lee cross paths: he returns to base with her as prisoner. But as his fellow rebels prepare to execute this tough-talking girl with nerves of steel, Flynn makes another choice that will change him forever. He and Lee escape the rebel base together, caught between two sides of a senseless war.

This Shattered World continues the Starbound adventure in a beautiful and fulfilling way! The characters, the worldbuilding and the story are all amazingly well done.

My This Shattered World review:

In This Shattered World, the readers are taken to another terraformed planet, one that doesn’t progress the way it’s supposed to, and where the army is needed to keep order and a fragile peace. There are rebels hiding in the swamps, and they are apt at coming and going without being noticed. The story starts out very strong, with the army captain Lee in the local bar with some of her soldiers. And she is kidnapped from right under their noses once she realizes that a guy who is checking her out is not in the army at all, and that there’s a big possibility he’s one of the rebels. The whole story is written in dual points of views, so the readers get to know both Flynn and Lee very well, the fact that it’s in first person present really made me feel as if I was a part of it as well.

Learning to see things from a different point of view, and also to think for themselves as individuals is a big theme in This Shattered World. Not everything is what it seems, and Lee quickly understands that the rebels have good reasons for fighting against the army and the establishment. Especially when Flynn takes her to a seemingly deserted island – where she can see shimmers of a building, and people before she loses consciousness.

Caught between the metaphorical rock and a hard place, both Flynn and Lee have to reevaluate their plans and the way they are thinking. Both come to see that the other side is not truly fighting against them, but rather they are both fighting to save Avon from total destruction. Of course, there is some kind of conspiracy going on, and Lee figures out that it may or may not have something to do with LaRoux.

There are sightings of Tarver and Lilac in This Shattered World as well, even if they are not at all the main characters this time around. And the fact that Tarver is Lee’s old captain has a lot to do with that. There is also a kind of strange illness that only seems to get to the off-world soldiers, all apart from Lee as a matter of fact. Once the violence builds, Lee and Flynn make almost manage to escape Avon, but at the very end of their trip in a small space-ship, they are forced back for a last battle. They end up back on the strange island with the not all there complex, and when they are able to feel it – after Lilac had told them to not trust their eyes but rather what they could feel – things happen so, so fast! There are whispers, scientists, revolutionaries and soldiers for the final show-down.

Needless to say, if you haven’t started the Starbound series yet, I can only urge you to do so. Ask Santa for the first two full novels and the novella for Christmas, and make sure you have enough time to gorge on this amazing universe with characters that will only leave you wanting more.

Some of my favourite This Shattered World quotes:

 Still, the new ones know by the end of their first week not to hit on Captain Chase, even when she’s at Molly Malone’s. I’m not interested, and they know it. Eighteen is pretty young to take yourself off the market, but it’s safer to send them all the same message from day one.

This one’s different, though – and he’s all alone. Wariness tingles at the base of my neck, my gaze sharpening. Here on Avon, different usually means dangerous.

I don’t know what I expected her to be like, but it wasn’t this. The stories about her say she’s made of steel – she volunteered to come ot Avon, the planet that drives men mad. She never runs, never hides, never loses. Stone-faced Chase, inhuman and deadly.

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