Stray by Andrea K. Höst
My rating: 4 of 5 starsAlert: Spoilers Below!!!
I need to say up front that I received this book for free from BookRooster.com.
Cassandra is an Australian girl who walks through a sort of wormhole on her way home from school, and ends up on a completely different planet. She manages to make her way through the forests she initially stepped into, and winds up in what appears to be an abandoned city, encountering various animals and plants that resemble some on Earth along the way. She is finally "rescued" by a people from a nearby planet, who tell her she's a "stray" -- a person who wanders from their own planet/space-time and into another. When it is discovered that Cass has the ability to enhance the psychic powers of the people on this new planet, she takes on a special role with them.
I very much enjoyed this book. It was well-written and well-edited, which have been problems with recent ebooks I've read. The story is told completely from Cass' point of view, via her journal. She is very resourceful, managing to stay alive on an unknown planet completely by herself -- but still falls into funks on occasion, especially when she's feeling particularly like a lab rat.
As another reviewer on Goodreads pointed out, this is quite unlike other popular YA fiction in that there's no love triangle. In fact, there's no romance at all, other than Cass' crush on one of the people she's working with. While part of me was rooting for her to break through Ruuel's tough exterior, for the most part I was happy that wasn't a focus of the story; it really couldn't be for the story to remain true to the plot.
I was intrigued by the concept of the Ena, near-space, far-space, and the Ionoth. It seemed like the Setari spent most of their time battling bad memories. Quite a metaphor, that. I wondered a number of times throughout the book at the ethics of the Taren's fight against the Ionoth, especially during the mission in which they were attacked by the "white-gray hairy" Ionoth. Were the Setari really protecting themselves and others, or were they invading another world and killing the inhabitants. Although the Setari said their scan indicated that the hairy humanoids were from another area, it seems like those Ionoth may have been acting simply to defend themselves. Perhaps that question will be answered in the next book.
Sigh. Next book. Perhaps I'm getting old and jaded, but I remember a time when a book was just a book, not part of a trilogy, and the whole story was told in one shot. Yes, this is the first of a trilogy. I should have confirmed that before I started, but I chose to be blissfully ignorant. I will probably read the next two books, at some point, to hopefully clear up some of my questions, but I can't help but feel a little like a sucker for getting, well, sucked in by another series. Does everything really have to be a series these days? Can't authors try to pare themselves down to one book? I'm getting skeptical enough to believe that this is done solely for money-making purposes, rather than a real need for a story to take up more than one volume. Feel free to argue with me about that.
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