Review: For Darkness Shows the Stars by Diana Peterfreund

It’s been several generations since a genetic experiment gone wrong caused the Reduction, decimating humanity and giving rise to a Luddite nobility who outlawed most technology.

Elliot North has always known her place in this world. Four years ago Elliot refused to run away with her childhood sweetheart, the servant Kai, choosing duty to her family’s estate over love. Since then the world has changed: a new class of Post-Reductionists is jumpstarting the wheel of progress, and Elliot’s estate is foundering, forcing her to rent land to the mysterious Cloud Fleet, a group of shipbuilders that includes renowned explorer Captain Malakai Wentforth–an almost unrecognizable Kai. And while Elliot wonders if this could be their second chance, Kai seems determined to show Elliot exactly what she gave up when she let him go.

But Elliot soon discovers her old friend carries a secret–one that could change their society . . . or bring it to its knees. And again, she’s faced with a choice: cling to what she’s been raised to believe, or cast her lot with the only boy she’s ever loved, even if she’s lost him forever.

Inspired by Jane Austen’s “Persuasion”, “For Darkness Shows the Stars” is a breathtaking romance about opening your mind to the future and your heart to the one person you know can break it.

Ohmygoodnessgracious!!!!!

This book. It SO wasn’t what I was expecting! I don’t WHAT I was expecting, but it wasn’t this.

Okay, let me back up a little bit.

Hearing that this book is comparable to Jane Austen’s Persuasion (which is one of my all-time favorites, by the way), I KNEW I had to pick it up. So, when I won it from the EXTREMELY fabulous folks over at Epic Reads, I knew it was meant to be that I read this.

How does Ms. Peterfreund get a book to be squeal-worthy when the main characters never even lay LIPS on each other?! I don’t know…But, hot dang, she did it!

After refusing her love, Kai, four years ago, Elliot is surely shocked to see him show up with the group that is renting out her grandfather’s land to build a ship. But, Kai isn’t the same Kai that left Elliot four years ago.

Between Kai’s romantic interest in Elliot’s neighbor, a father and sister who continue to treat Elliot–as well as their workers–with continued disdain, and a love for boy who seems to have morphed into someone who both hates her and someone she doesn’t recognize anymore, Elliot is sinking quickly into a life that’s getting beyond her control.

Her only concern is keeping her workers safe and making life better for them, and everyone that she’s in charge of…And maybe pining after Kai a little bit, as well.

The premise may be borrowed, in a way, from a brilliant author, but the background is as original as it gets.

Jane Austen in a dystopian-society? YES!!! Now, if Ms. Peterfreund would just make a sequel.

~My Rating~

~About the Author~

Diana Peterfreund has been a costume designer, a cover model, and a food critic. Her travels have taken her from the cloud forests of Costa Rica to the underground caverns of New Zealand (and as far as she’s concerned, she’s just getting started). Diana graduated from Yale University in 2001 with dual degrees in Literature and Geology, which her family claimed would only come in handy if she wrote books about rocks. Now, this Florida girl lives with her husband and their puppy in Washington D.C., and writes books that rock

Her first novel, Secret Society Girl (2006), was described as “witty and endearing” by The New York Observer and was placed on the New York Public LIbrary’s 2007 Books for the Teen Age list. The follow-up, Under the Rose (2007) was deemed “impossible to put down” by Publisher’s Weekly, and Booklist called the third book, Rites of Spring (Break) (2008), “an ideal summer read.” The final book in the series, Tap & Gown, will be released in 2009. All titles are available from Bantam Dell.

She also contributed to the non-fiction anthologies, Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume, edited by Jennifer O’Connell (Pocket Books, 2007), The World of the Golden Compass, edited by Scott Westerfeld (BenBella Books, 2007), and Through the Wardrobe, edited by Herbie Brennan (BenBella Books, 2008).

Her first young adult novel, Rampant, an adventure fantasy about killer unicorns and the virgin descendents of Alexander the Great who hunt them, will be released by Harper Collins in 2009. When she’s not writing, Diana volunteers at the National Zoo, adds movies she has no intention of watching to her Netflix queue, and plays with her puppy, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever named Rio.

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