Scavenge the Stars ARC Review

Scavenge the Stars by Tara Sim is a gender-bent fantasy retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo. It’s filled with adventure, surprise, and just the right amount of romance. This book follows Amaya (otherwise known as Silverfish), a girl forced to work on a ship called the Brackish in an attempt to pay off the debt her parents left her. When she rescues a stranger from drowning, he brings her into a world of glamor and unimaginable riches in return for something far less pretty: revenge against the man who ruined her family and stole from her the girl she once was. This one choice throws her into a world where nobles and gamblers are one and the same, and no one is who they say they are- including her. Along the way, Amaya’s path intertwines with the son of the man she’s trying to bring down, and truth becomes more and more difficult to separate from lies.

This book had a lot to unpack. And I mean a lot. At the surface, it seems interesting. High fantasy, set in a city called Moray, similar to Leigh Bardugo’s Ketterdam, where crime and nobility constantly intertwine, and a girl whose life is changed by compassion for a stranger. But then it goes deeper. The world and characters Tara Sim has created are built on deceit, and she slowly reveals that by pulling aside curtain after curtain, revealing what’s really going on little by little, until her readers realize that what they thought they knew about the novel was completely wrong. The way she pulled the rug out from under my feet time and time again was one of my favorite things about the novel.

I really loved Amaya and Cayo. Each was built in a way that made them seem authentic and real, throughout the book they were constantly defying their own expectations, pushing their own boundaries, and ultimately learning that they had always been more capable of great things than they ever thought possible. I also genuinely enjoyed the romance that was sprinkled throughout this book, because it wasn’t the entire plot, but it helped move the plot forward. There were many good things brought up through the romance in the characters and how it affected the way they saw the world, and it didn’t feel like it was just added in to appeal to readers.

The writing in Scavenge the Stars is super strong and amazingly poetic prose I’ve come to know and love through YA fantasy. One of my favorite features of this book was the small quotes at the beginning of each chapter. They were so enjoyable because they were written by Sim, pulled from myths and books and guides that really immersed me into Moray and its culture. Each quote set the mood for the chapter and getting to see little snippets of the character’s culture was an extremely wise choice for worldbuilding.

Speaking of worldbuilding, it was superb. I honestly wish I could have gotten more of it. The little snippets I got made me extremely interested in this world that Sim obviously spent a lot of time creating, and she really understood how to make her characters interact with the world around them. There was so much packed into the plot that I was left hoping for more background on Moray and beyond it, as well as the secondary characters. The whole book moves at lightning speed, and I feel like it lacked some moments that would have allowed me to slow down and look at the world around me, as well as meet some characters that I definitely was intrigued by. But, the moments I did get to explore the world she created were like little gems hidden throughout the novel and I enjoyed them immensely.

Scavenge the Stars will be on sale on January 7, 2020! Fans of Leigh Bardugo, Sara J. Maas, and V.E Schwab will love this book and its beautiful writing, worldbuilding, and characters. I genuinely recommend it to all of my fellow fantasy-lovers for a nice, refreshing, new world that’s got all sorts of secrets and lies hidden just beneath the surface.