For Darkness Shows the Stars

This book.



Sigh.

I am such a fan of retellings. Especially modern retellings of my old favorites. I just absolutely adored this book. It was one part Persuasion and one part sci-fi romance. (and I do NOT like sci-fi books.)

For fans of Persuasion (that won't nitpick every detail), you'll be pleased with what the author has done. The main characters are loyal to their original Austen roles. The trade mark misunderstandings are also in place. There are a few differences that really make this book its own, and not just a copy cat.

For instance, the idea of this man-made plague type disease that destroyed humanity is obviously not Austen. Elliot is a bit more outspoken than her Austen character would be as well. And Kai? Well, Kai is Wentworth. Period.

There isn't much I could say because the plot really does follow the plot of Persuasion. The setting is uniquely its own, which really won me over. It wasn't over the top sci-fi (thank goodness), but it did have a few elements that would appease sci-fi fans. My only gripe is how quickly the ending wrapped up. The psycho father was ushered out of the picture with only a mild fight, and things became all rosy for Elliot in the matter of pages. That felt a bit rushed given the circumstances. I also got a bit annoyed by the letters from a younger Elliot and Kai that kept popping up. I eventually just stopped reading them because I didn't feel like they added much to the story.



I really want to check out the remaining books in the series, but they don't seem to feature the same characters which is a big disappointment for me too. I really want to know what happens for Elliot and Kai.

For Darkness Shows the Stars is one of those book that takes time to develop but when it grip you, it does not let you go until the end.

Inspired by Jane Austen's Persuasion, For Darkness Shows the Stars is set in a post-apocalyptic version of Earth. Social structure reminded me of Gone with the Wind. Luddites govern the land while Reduced are servants. At the start I was confused how we declined into slavery again, but slowly the reasons were revealed to me. Diana Peterfreund really tests your patience in some points. Readers who are used to new fast and gritty style of writing might be bored, but I think lovers of classics will enjoy reading For Darkness Shows the Stars.

For Darkness Shows the Stars by Diana Peterfreund
The main focus of For Darkness Shows the Stars is romance. Those who have read Persuasion, know the story well: forbidden young love, pain over unrequited feelings, questioning is everything worth sacrificing for true love... Elliot and Kai had me sighing and signing I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That).

As always dystopian setting also poses some interesting philosophical questions. Do genetical enhancements make us something else than human? Should science be limited? Can some acts be qualified as 'playing God'? Is controlling people 'for their own good' right? Those and many more similar questions were running trough their mind while I was reading.

Diana Peterfreund has another treat scheduled for us on October 15th 2013: Across a Star-Swept Sea is set in the same world and based on The Scarlet Pimpernel. I hope I will enjoy it as much as I did For Darkness Shows the Stars. Until then, prequel novellas Among the Nameless Stars and The First Star To Fall are free on Amazon. I know I will be reading them soon.

In The End...
For Darkness Shows the Stars is written in style which fans of classic literature will enjoy. The world building and characterisation take time to develop but when they do you will sigh over forbidden love and ponder some interesting questions. I know I will be recommending this book to a lot of my friends.

I was confused at first by all the terminology and the groups of people. Even though the synopsis tells a bit, I still was floundering. But the letters between Elliot (also confused me a bit, because she is a girl) and Kai when they were children cleared up some of it. It also served the purpose of setting up their history together, the friendship that spanned years and even though there was a difference in class, they still were smart and had many similarities. After a while though, I began to get tired of the letters, I think mostly because I just don't normally do that format, and skimmed them.
Even with the initial confusion, the writing was good, and Elliot's voice really got me. I wanted for her to succeed, and I admired the responsibility she felt toward those under her in class, to make sure they were fed, and how she truly cared about them as people.
But like Ashley at Nose Graze said better than me... Not a lot happened, it was a lot of talk about what should be right, and if Elliot is doing the right thing, or if she is doing what got the previous generations in so much trouble. And the romance... Kai is pretty mean to Elliot when he comes back, and there is just no justification for that. The things he said about her and her family when she is doing the best she can... Maybe the lit feeling and some of Kai's actions are because of the Persuasion influence and I just don't get it because I have never read it... I don't know.
But I surely cannot deny the chemistry between Kai and Elliot. In their clipped conversations and meetings, it is igniting, and I have to remind myself how mean he was. That he is seeing a 14 year old--which was another thing I hated, but had a feeling that the triangle and age gap is also an Austen influence. I had to remind myself that he was either leading on an innocent and sweet girl, or Elliot would get her heart broken in those moments.
So, even for the world building that confused me, the romance that at the same time enthralled me and that I hated, and the lit feeling, I still couldn't put it down. I had to know what would happen, and I couldn't look away.
For everything that was wrong with this book, the ending was right. It touched me and almost made me cry how everything came together when I didn't see how it possibly could. I will be reading the next one!

Bottom Line: I had my issues, but I couldn't put the story down.

Important point: Persuasion is my favorite Jane Austen novel, and it’s one of my favorite novels ever. Period, dot, end of story. Any attempt to “retell” that novel will rub me the wrong way, since it can only ever be a knock-off (read: desecration) of Persuasion. Now, just to be clear, For Darkness Shows the Stars is an extremely awesome book, and Diana Peterfreund actually does Austen’s original justice. But. It isn’t the original, it can never compare to the original; therefore, I hate it. And I love it.

Stupid book, making my feels take sides against each other. It isn’t fair.

This book was pitched to me by several sources as being “Persuasion in space.” Considering the title and cover, I was expecting aliens, spaceships, and something or other about Luke’s father and Wookies. Alas! There was no space travel (or Jedis) in For Darkness Shows the Stars—I almost feel cheated. Rather, this novel takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where excessive genetic modification has made people stupid, i.e. “Reduced.”

Apparently, this Reduction was God’s punishment on mankind for attempting to be, well…God. Cue my first issue with this novel. So I get that God punished people; that’s fine, I have no problem with that (as a plot point). I do have problems with the fact that Elliot North (the protagonist) never really resolves and/or reconciles her God problems (like daddy problems, only worse). Is genetic modification really bad? It created the apocalypse, so it must be, yet Elliot’s off doing her own experiments that she feels are “sin.” You can’t have it both ways, honey. In the end Elliot just kind of…stops thinking about God? Like because she’s in love and her world is suddently perfect, so she can just forget about the great emotional turmoil that she’s been fighting because she doesn’t know if God approves of what she’s doing.

Seriously, Peterfreund? You can’t throw in a HUGE theme like “doing God’s will” into your book only to blow it off at the end, throw your hands up in the air and say “Oh look, they get married!” and all is resolved. Nope, not buying it.

Yeah, um. Most of my problems with this book have to do with the way the plot was resolved. But good stuff first.
Characterization was top-notch. Of Jane Austen’s heroines, Anne Elliot is the least proactive, which many readers don’t like. Peterfruend’s version of her, Elliot North, is definitely very proactive. She sticks up for herself and for others. The scene where she looses her temper and tells Kai off for being a grouchy haterboy was absolutely phenomenal, and I just liked her personality all around. I found it very interesting how the author was able to stay true to the Spirit of Austen (yes, that is a proper noun) yet manage to create a protagonist who’s entirely different.

Kai—Malakai Wentforth—was also a strong character, though he stayed more true to his inspiration, Wentworth. Supporting characters were all good and interesting, though Elliot’s older sister, Tatiana, had some very ambiguous motivations that, looking back, I now question.

Also: world-building. One reason I hate reading dystopian fiction is because I’m never satisfied in the world-building department. Not the case here! The whys and wherefores of how this society came to be were explained to my satisfaction, and not in an info-dumpy kind of way.

Plot in general was also good. Obviously, I knew how everything was going to end and I wasn’t surprised in the least by any of the various plot twists. Peterfreund definitely stayed very true to Persuasion as far as plot points, character relationships, etc. go. I was a little annoyed when she lifted lines or sentences straight from Austen, because it felt forced and jolted me out of my reading zone and made me remember that I was, in fact, reading a retelling.

But the end was awful. I just…mmm. Me = angry. Many thoughts, no words to express them. I think what the author was trying to do was give For Darkness Shows the Stars a nice kick in the pants and zest things up with some originality. Except it was just awful and lovey-dovey and yuck. Yuck yuck yuck. The “letter scene” is one of the most powerful and memorable things in Austen’s novel, and it was something I was looking forward to in this retelling. Major disappointment.

And there you have it. I have not read another desecration of Jane Austen that I enjoyed nearly so much. This novel stayed true to the Spirit of Austen, took a few well-intentioned liberties that may or may not have panned out, and managed to tell a good story, too. I would probably recommend this more towards readers who haven’t already read Persuasion. Just be forewarned that there are no Wookies, lightsabers, or incestuous twins in sight.

This is going to be a tough review for me to write. It seems the books you've most been anticipating are the ones that are most difficult to reflect upon. I had so many expectations going into For Darkness Shows the Stars (FDStS), something you can tell if you scroll back through my blog posts. In fact, I was entirely confident that this book would be a new FAVORITE, because how could a dystopian/Austen combo NOT become one of my top reads of all time? Well, with those weighty expectations, FDStS did not entirely satisfy me.

Peterfreund is a marvelous author, and she truly accomplishes what she aimed for in FDStS. First off, she got the Persuasion aspects of the story pitch perfect. The characters and their emotions are all by the book. Though many of the scenes and the overall situation are greatly changed, there is no doubting that this is a futuristic retelling of Persuasion. I am seriously impressed by Peterfreund's talent and how she made a story about an older couple (for their time) into a story about teenagers. Though I do feel it might have worked a bit better with slightly older main characters, she did make the tale work for youths.

What makes that work is the society in which FDStS is set. The world has regressed, run by Luddites, those who fear technology. Messing with genes, robotics and medicines, humans became close to gods, but there was an unfortunate consequence: the Reduction. Wars and, perhaps, divine punishment left the world populated by the Luddites, largely unchanged and the Reduced, unable to speak and used as slaves. The Luddites are much like the landowners of Austen's time: wealthy, privileged and built upon the backs of abused workers.

This political and social landscape is complicated more and more as time passes. Not all children of the Reduced are Reduced as well. Some of them (1 in 20) has all the capabilities of a regular person. The Luddites, comfy in their estates, try to keep the CORs (Children of the Reduced) in the same menial state, bound by the same laws. The CORs prefer to think of themselves as Posts (Post-Reduction), the beginning of something new. This is a time of upheaval, a nice parallel to the social issues in Austen's novels. The Posts have money and talent that Elliot's Luddite family now lacks, much like Captain Wentworth earned a fortune in the army in Austen's Persuasion.

Elliot, like her namesake Anne Elliot, does not fit in with her family. Her father and sister care only about material things: clothing, racetracks and other such trappings. Elliot works hard to try to help the Posts and the Reduced on the family farms and estate, burdened by her family's extravagance. Meanwhile, she is haunted by worries about what has become of the boy she loved as a child, Kai, who left to find fortune at 14.

In Persuasion, Anne Elliot turned down Wentworth's initial proposal because her family deemed him unworthy. In Elliot's case, she let him go of her own volition, not because of any direct social pressure. Still, she has always loved him and they have been friends since a young age, due to their shared birthday. Interspersed with the main part of the novel are letters the two snuck back and forth to one another throughout their childhood. These, while sometimes entertaining, perhaps could have been reduced, or at least put into chronological order. Bouncing around in time really didn't help their impact.

My issue with the book, despite its quality, is that I did not connect to Elliot or to Kai. Persuasion, though beautiful, is not my favorite Austen novel. I have trouble forgiving Anne and Wentworth for their behavior to one another, especially Wentworth's stupid and shameless flirting with the stupid neighbor girl. Peterfreund did such a good job with their characters that I feel much the same about Elliot and Kai. While I root for them more than I do for the other characters, I also didn't feel any special warmness towards them.

So there you have it as clearly as I can manage to put it. FDStS is brilliantly done, but it didn't touch my heart, at least not on this reading. I do think it's funny that her unicorn series is much darker than her dystopia. Still, if you're interested in this one, do give it a try.