Title: Journey to Hopewell Star
Author: Hannah D. State
Publisher: Glowing Light Press
Rating: 3/5
Genre: Middle Grade Fiction, sci-fi
Review:

This is a very tricky book for me to write a review on… I want to say first and foremost that I did enjoy reading this book. In this review, I wanted to analyse it as both a writer and a reader. I want to provide suggestions on ways to improve my own writing, as well as help others. I like the story that this book tells, and I’m very glad that I get to read books like these.

This book is like a mix of Keeper of the Lost Cities book series by Shannon Messenger, and James Cameron’s blue people Avatar. And I mean that incredibly literally. Let me get this out of the way by saying, I love when a new Atlantic Canadian sci-fi book comes along. I love when authors write a book that lets them reimagine the places that they call home. Setting alien bases in Atlantic Canada, and being able to read about alien events that take place where I live is kinda cool.

Now, I had high expectations for this book and I was quite disappointed. When you put your five star rating, the blurbs from other authors, and the award that you won right on the book cover, yeah I’m going to go into the book thinking it’s this really good sci-fi. But honestly, I feel like this book has a good premise but bad execution. It really baffles me how this book has won awards, especially since it won an award for something in the wrong category. All of the blurbs seem to think it’s a young adult (for 13-17yrs) novel too, when I can 100% guarantee you this is NOT a YA novel. It’s won all the awards in the YA category, and the praise for this book calls it YA, but it’s not YA. It’s middle grade (8-12 yrs). I usually gage this by the age of the protagonist, and the mc of this book (Sam) is 12 years old. Plus the maturity rating for this book isn’t too high at all, it’s not gory or dark enough to be higher on the maturity scale.

For the most part, I enjoyed reading this book. It was a fun story that it told. I really wish I could pass it off in the “not for me” category, but this is usually the kind of story I really love. it’s just not done as well as I would have liked it to be done. I understand that this is a debut novel, and that it was a short story before, so I can get behind that. Personally, I think it should gone through a few more rounds of edits. There were a lot of things that could have been fixed, writing wise, pacing wise, and plot wise. So let’s discuss the many aspects of the book that is Journey to the Hopewell Star.

The Writing
In Chapter 3 I noticed that this book was interestingly paced. I think both the writing and the pacing go hand in hand; the writing makes the pacing feel weird. There are also just some sentences that could be revised, like this one: “Titus could feel his anger erupting like a volcano ready to explode.” (Page 226) I want you to sit on that sentence for a minute and figure out what’s wrong with it. It says “like” a volcano ready to explode, meaning nothing has exploded yet. But before that, it says his anger had already erupted. This one sentence goes from future tense and then back to past tense. Things like this could be caught in editing, and I really think this book needed more editing before being published.

Pacing wise, I felt that the first few chapters weren’t done as well as they could have been. We’re introduced to Sam, and from what we get through the thoughts of her grandfather, he says that she’s level headed and smart. She’s practical, she likes their quiet life on the farm. We get this in 5 pages through pure exposition. We’re just given fact after fact about these people. On the second page we find out that her parents left Earth to go on some space mission and that they haven’t returned yet. Now, I understand the need to exposit information to the reader, you need to set up your world and your characters. I get that.

But it’s also weird when you put your information in the wrong place? It just really didn’t feel natural to me. I thought the opening scene was missing some beats as well, I think it could have been slower paced, especially at the part when she gets to the barn. After that we have the sequence where she goes into the barn and finds a blue alien kid. This happens on the 8th page. All we really know about this girl is
a) her name (Sam Sanderson)
b) that her parents left to go on space adventures
c) she lives with her Grandpa on a farm and that he homeschooled her
d) apparently she’s also sensible but the scene where that’s supposed to be “shown” to us isn’t very good. She said two lines and didn’t react much.

I would recommend that if you’re not going to properly let us get to know your character before the inciting incident happens, I would prefer that you just opened up on the action, rather than have attempts to introduce your character. Because we’re supposed to already know Sam, already care about her when the inciting incident happens. But that is not what happens in this book. By the time that she’s set to go on her big adventure, I feel like we haven’t been properly introduced to this character. All we know is information about her, and 1 trait about her. We know that she’s smart but we’ve only been told that she’s smart. I also have no idea what’s at stake for her right now, or even her alien friend. It’s alluded that the higher ups in charge are going to be mad at the alien kid for letting himself be seen by a human, nonetheless bringing one to his own planet? But no, he tells her that she can stay for days instead of just sending her home so that he wouldn’t get into further trouble. But if she went home right away, we would have no story. This is what gets me with books, when the reason for things happening relies heavily on the characters lacking critical thinking skills.

As I mentioned above, the writing is also quite tell-y. I’m not sure if that makes sense, but especially when you’re introducing a new world it’s best to show it. You can’t just tell your reader about it, that’s too much information going into their brain in a short amount of time. I believe in chapter 3 or 4 it just starts info dumping a lot about Kryg (the alien planet), and frankly, I don’t remember what any of that info dumping said. Some of it was critical to the plot, some of it was just “cool alien world stuff”. Something that probably attributed to the fact that I remember next to nothing about Kryg is that we simply don’t spend a lot of time there. I’ll get to this part later in the “plot” section of my review.

I’m not sure if the writing being very
tell
tell
tell
is a stylistic choice, but what does get me is how it is written. It’s told in 3rd person POV, (and by the way, this book deicides to switch POVs whenever it’s convenient, it never really sticks to 2 set POVs, or 3 set POVs that we cut to continuously in the book. We’re mainly in Sam’s POV, but it jumps around to her grandfather’s Onnisa’s, Kato’s, Aruna’s, and even Titus’ POV, simply whenever it feels convenient to jump.) there are a lot of things that could have been changed with editing. It’s very “and then” “and then” sounding. There’s one sentence that says “She ran her fingers along the edge of the silver blanket. She let out a gasp.” Why doesn’t it just say something like “Running her fingers along the edge of the silver blanket, she let out a gasp.” or something like that? I counted how many times the word “she” appears in half of a page, are you ready? 12 times.

The Characters
What’s going on up in Sam’s head makes her feel like a very static character. She’s actually a pretty passive character for the entirety of the book. Yes, the entirely of the book. I don’t think I can recall a single decision that she truly and fully made herself. Preferably, you want your characters to drive the plot. Not have the plot drive your characters. Sam being a static character truly makes the pacing feel so strange, Her grandfather explodes the food printer, not her. Grandfather tells her to go outside, not her. The dog runs away to the barn, she follows. She doesn’t make the decision to go to another planet, her alien friend tells her she needs to go to another planet. Having a passive character for your opening? The hook of the story?

As for the other characters, I found them rather underdeveloped. The same can be said for Kryg as well. The other characters are quite surface level characters that only exist to uplift our main character. I didn’t find that they had any sort of motivations or really even their own lives aside from being around Sam.

The Plot
There are a lot of subplots in this book. Many different things were crammed into this story. I wonder about what this story is truly trying to do. It has a subplot about saving the world, it has environmental undertones, that’s the Hopewell Star plotline. But then a big part of this book is technology, how it corrupts people and plagues the Earth. Then there also a supernatural aspect of this book, that’s introduced through “mind travelling”. Mind travelling is explained really strangely, I didn’t understand it fully. When the words “mind travelling” come to mind, I think of something like lucid dreaming, or even shifting, but in this book it makes mind travelling out to be like your physical body moves through different dimensions as well as your mind. Sam thinks a lot of times that she needs to “mind travel out” or “mind travel away” and that doesn’t make a lot of sense. I’m aware that it was probably better explained, but those reasons didn’t quite stick with me for the entire book. Also telepathy exists… in this world, and I don’t fully understand how Sam gained telepathy powers either.

Look, about the whole mind travelling and telepathy thing… I understand what the author was trying to do, but I think there could have been a better way to do it. Then this book decides that it wants to play mind games with telepathy and mind travelling. It’s an interesting choice, I guess. It’s introduced very late, especially if this is going to be a major plot point later on. This is like 130 pages in . That’s almost half of the book. I would have liked it a lot better if this was set up earlier.

As for the first part of the plot, Sam becomes the queen based on the Hopewell Star prophecy. This prophecy is just short of being a step by step guide of how Sam is going to save the world, but I digress. What also bugs me is that the prophecy says Sam is just going to be the new queen of Kryg… effective immediately, I guess. I found it strange, imagine if we just elected our world leaders because it was in a prophecy. Imagine if the world leaders knew nothing about the society they’ve been chosen to lead, and lastly, imagine if they were 12 year old children. I can’t see anything that makes Sam out to be a competent leader.

This book is also set in a world that’s slightly more advanced that our current Earth, in the first bit of the book we’re told that they’re using a sort of 3D printer to “print” their meals, and that every house has one nowadays. That’s supposed to be out indicator of how advanced tech is. Later in the book it’s mentioned that their school has a robot, and that robots are sort of on the rise as well. Her parents are also off transcending galaxies and carrying out space missions, so they are fairly advanced. I guess, at that point my question is… why would you then assume that the blue guy in your barn in a strange suit bleeding blue blood… is wearing a costume? You’re aware that aliens exist and that space travel is advanced enough for transporting people across galaxies. There’s a space ship that crashed into your barn for goodness sake. This girl is supposed to be sensible and rational, but I don’t see that from her.

On Earth, Sam doesn’t do a whole lot. And this is what doesn’t make sense to me, she’s the queen of Kryg, she’s the chosen one. She’s supposed to be helping them by finding the giant star. I don’t understand why 70% of this book made the queen of an alien planet live on Earth. Why is this book even be sci-fi if it’s going to have little to no sci-fi elements? I understand that a major plot point of this book is because of Earth, but honestly I would have re-written that.

Final Thoughts
I didn’t want to read a sci-fi and have most of it be Sam living on Earth and going to school and hanging out with her friends. I do understand that this book was a former short story, but it really wasn’t ready to be sent out into the world and be published, in my own humble opinion. Despite this book’s shortcomings, I’m having fun with it. I had fun drawing Boj and Sam as you can see on my Instagram under @youth_draw_the_word. It’s been a fun time analyzing this book from the perspective of both a writer and a reader, and I feel like this book helps me improve my own writing. This book also sparks my own creativity, because where there are gaps in the worldbuilding of Kryg, and characters that are slightly underdeveloped, it gives me an outlet to exercise my own creativity. Also, it has that sort of nostalgia effect for me. This is exactly the kind of story that I wanted to write when I was 12 years old, and I mean exactly. I was 12 and I would wake up early in the morning and type out my book idea on my computer, human going to an alien planet, meeting an alien friend, meeting a mentor, becoming queen… so in a way, I can appreciate that this book did something that I didn’t have the courage to do when I wanted to write a similar story.

They were also kind enough to send me books 1 and 2 in Mexico, so I’ll be reviewing Journey to the Dark Galaxy soon.
I know this review is really long and kind of all over the place, I took a lot of notes as I was reading, so I had a tricky time organizing this into a cohesive review, but nonetheless, if you stuck around I really appreciate that :]

I also think that this book is worth being given a try despite it’s shortcomings. It’s clearly won a lot of awards because people do enjoy it. :]