Scardust

Suzanne van Rooyen

Completed 11/10/2018, Reviewed 11/11/2018

3 stars

I read this book because I saw a friend of mine reading it on Goodreads, it was inexpensive on Amazon, and it featured a science fiction M/M romance.  It had a lot of good imagery, and the prose was decent.  For some reason though, I couldn’t get engrossed in the story.  I read it feeling somewhat removed from the action.  I tried to let the characters get into my head, but they just wouldn’t stick.  In the end, I thought it was okay, but nothing earthshattering.

Raleigh Williams is a nineteen-year-old man in Dead Rock, Texas in the near future.  Before his brother committed suicide, Raleigh promised him he would scatter his ashes on Mars.  Now he wants to get accepted into the MarsLife program to follow through with his promise.  The only thing holding him back is his juvie record and money.  He’s saving money for the entrance exam by turning tricks with the truckers passing through town.  One night, he is nearly missed by a falling meteor.  He investigates the crash site and finds a naked man with swirls all over his body.  When the strange man wakes up, he finds he can’t remember his name or his past.  Raleigh names him Crow.  Together they try to find out who Crow is, heal Raleigh’s past, and slowly but surely fall in love. 

The plot is interesting.  It plays a lot with the concept of reality, and you constantly question whether Crow is an alien, an artificial intelligence, or a human.  He seems human, and is falling in love with Raleigh, but strange things keep happening, like his eyes shine purple and he heals instantly.  The stakes rise when it appears that they are being hunted by people in black, non-descript SUVs.  They say they are from homeland security, but they act a lot more nefariously than your average government agent. 

The characterization is pretty good as well.  Raleigh is a broken fellow.  He’s been in juvenile detention for beating up the sheriff’s son, and of course, the sheriff’s son had been harassing and bullying Raleigh for years.  Besides that, he has terrible self-esteem for being a sex worker.  He believes his is unlovable, that no one would want someone with his history, or that anyone who was interested in him would be trying to fix him.  So he loses either way.  With Crow, it’s different.  Crow seems to be the only person who might be able to pull him out of this downward spiral he’s on.  However, falling in love doesn’t jive with Raleigh’s plan to become an astronaut and get his brother’s ashes to Mars.  That’s one more monkey wrench in the burgeoning romance between the two.

The book is told in alternating POV between Crow and Raleigh.  Normally, this should let the reader really get into the heads of the main characters.  For me, it didn’t work.  I still felt third person-ish throughout the book, like I was removed from the situation.  It made the development of the romance seem to take forever, most of the book in fact.  But then the big twist in the end is pretty satisfying and in the last thirty or so pages, I was able to connect. 

I give the book three stars out of five.  The pros offset my disconnectedness from the characters.  All in all, it was a good book, just not very riveting until the end.