The Stars Too Fondly

This was a fun read to curl up with over this gloomy weekend! This book was suggested to me by Alana, and I was about 80% of the way through it when I remembered I had been meaning to save it for 2025 so I could use it in next year's friends recommendations! (Alana already claimed a month this year, with the excellent Ladyhoppers.) But I'm sure she'll be full of more good recommendations for next year (right??)!

The Stars Too Fondly is a spacemance, which is sci-fi's answer to romantasy. Cleo and her friends start out on a quest to break into the site of a failed spaceship that has been sitting empty for 20 years. While exploring, they manage to fire up the engines and send the ship off on it's original journey. Luckily, the captain of the original journey has programmed herself as a hologram on board the ship so they have help in figuring out what went wrong with the original plan, and of course how to get back home.....

I think this book did a great job balancing the sci-fi/action plot with the romance story, and I really enjoyed all the various plot lines. Just what I needed to help me escape reality for a weekend!

Some people might say that The Stars Too Fondly is a queer sci-fi space opera, but really it is queer fic with a sci-fi space opera twist. Starts as a heist, turns into a space opera sci-fi superhero mystery kind...thing. But really it is queer fic and sapphic romance. Girl grows up loving stories about the failed mission to Proxima Centauri, girl goes with her queer friends (1 trans girl, 1 enby, and 1 token straight guy for some reason) to heist a spaceship and figure out why it all went wrong, girl and queer friends are blasted off to Proxima Centauri on that experimental spaceship, girl falls for hologram memory of space ship's lost captain, girl and queer friends get superpowers and save the universe. Really a simple queer story like that. Not the best written characters but I always like the "computer falls in love" story because the romance is always wrapped around becoming-->person, which is a theme I love very very much.

And I guess it is fun to have really casual queer representation in a book. One of the little devices centers around the trans girl making sure there is enough spironolactone on the ship, with no explanation for cishet readers. Or arguing about stupid bullshit and teasing about crushes and cute relationships. Or friends figuring out your crushes long long before you, a stupid sapphic, do. Very relatable.

The only thing that feels a little unbelievable is that while girl and hologram are falling for each other, the real captain is watching through interdimensional timey-wimey stuff, and somehow that romance gets transferred over...it makes a nice conclusion (especially when they decide they need to make a hologram girl to exist with the hologram captain), but just kinda weird and I don't know if I buy it. How does that work really.

I liked but didn't love this but I did really appreciate the author's love of Star Trek Voyager!