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Quick Review: Starworld, by Audrey Coulthurst and Paula Garner

Right off the bat, before reading "Starworld," you should know: it is not a love story. Actually, let me amend that. It is not a romantic love story. Starworld centers on two girls, Zoe and Sam. Zoe is sort of the queen bee, popular-for-being-nice type at her school. However, at home, her mom is going through perpetual chemotherapy and her brother, who is severely disabled, is being sent to a group home. Sam's mother, who has severe OCD, makes her home life similarly challenging. Together they begin a text chain where they create an imaginary world and explore it. They also share fears, hopes, and dreams with each other.
Spoiler free :  Starworld is hard to rate. It was quite readable (I finished in about two hours.) and had a lot of good representation for disabilities, mental illness, and other things that might be spoilers. The way the girls communicate will take some getting used to, but after about a third of the book I found myself not even noticing it. The actual starworld in the book was not well developed, it was essentially just whatever they thought of with no cohesive plot. This wasn't quite a bad thing, but I would have liked more of a look into the actual world.


   One of my favorite parts of the novel was the family dynamics. Each character had a deep relationship with their families, loving them deeply but acknowledging and being irritated by their flaws. No one was perfect, and that was part of the charm of the story. All in all, Starworld ties together many types of love including plationic and familial to make an sweet story.
(3.5 stars for issues at the end.)

Spoilery -  When reading the blurb, you may have noticed that it says that Sam falls for Zoe. It asks if Starworld can survive this. While it doesn't happen until 85 percent of the way through the book, starworld does not survive. That's one of the reasons that I believe it would be better as a middle grade book. Other than some mild swearing, there isn't a ton that makes this young adult. Instead of a story about unrequited love, it would have been much more successful as a story about a first crush and how friendships change.
Although I was irritated about the collapse of starworld, that likely is what would have happened in real life. That still did not make it interesting, which is why I give Starworld three and a half stars.

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