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A fun read – a fantasy-romance-science fiction and perhaps even western mashup – and one that will appeal to both YA and adult lovers of imaginative fiction.

Vega, our first person POV narrator, is a seventeen-year-old girl who has spent her entire life living in an isolated and remote valley in an undisclosed location with her Mom. With a timeline that may be the past, or may be the future, as elements of both abound, it’s not clear for some time exactly who, or what, Vega and her Mom are. Our only clue is their direct and primal shared connection to the night sky, the stars and the constellations, in all their glory, as Vega and her Mom obsessively study and map them.

As an always-deadly illness, labeled by the villagers as ‘consumption’, spreads and sweeps across their world, Vega, informed by a particular alignment of the stars, must travel the country on a mysterious quest, that requires her to meet and enlist the help of a certain Architect (capital intended) to go about the business of what the reader presumes is saving the world.

Burdened with a neck tattoo which will disclose her secret and place her in grave danger, Vega must work covertly, and cannot be sure who can be trusted to help and not harm her. With pistols popping and horses galloping, Vega soon finds herself both in fear for her life, and tantalizingly partnered with a hunky green-eyed rebel and his team of mostly teenage misfits. With eyes so green they warrant several dozen literary references, Noah and Vega click so deeply and so instantaneously that it must be fate (or those stars again?).

Without giving the plot away (no spoilers here), there is plenty of drama, danger, and suspense ahead, right up to the twisty ending that this reader found unexpected and delightful.

A great big thank you to the author, and the publisher for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.
@siminschusterCA # sheaernshaw