Breath and Starshine – Review and Impressions

_{Disclosure: I received a Early Review Ebook from the author in hopes of a review through the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program in February 2023. I am very, very late to reading the book, but life sometimes makes it difficult to get things done in the time we think they ought to get done!}

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Breath and Starshine by Kami King Larsen is a book set in a far post-apocalyptic world where a much reduced population mostly struggles to get by. Holding society together are a series of settlements which seemed to be held together by the Medicus Corpus – a quasi-government which the reader is not sure is a benevolent association or medical dictatorship.

Aurelia is a medical practitioner assigned to a hub settlement out in the desert. For all the stripping away of many modern conveniences – reliable electricity and easy travel, for starters – there’s still a fair amount of technological advancement in the medical field. However, Aurelia struggles with the ethics of using a gift of healing outside what is proscribed by the Medicus Corpus.

Add to this that in their settlement, strange attacks targeting young women are starting to happen, most of which are fatal, and have all the marks of suffocation – in the middle of the desert. Despite precautions, Aurelia seems to be the perfect target for the next attack…

I liked this book quite a bit. There’s quite a lot that is original, and it’s obvious that the author has experience with both the medical aspects and the American southwest. I liked that there were kind of “cute” details – Aurelia, for one, deals with a pair of seemingly ill-fitting glasses from time to time, and is described as being incredibly short for an adult woman, which does sometimes literally change her viewpoint.

I didn’t really care for the way the chapters switched narrators; it reminded me too much of a Baby-Sitters’ Club Super-Special. However, with those, it was pretty much assumed that the reader knew the characters, coming into a book that is the second in a series, it wasn’t immediately clear who the characters were. (The Ebook version that I received also didn’t seem to have a table of contents or chapter dividers, so flipping back to different characters’ chapters was more difficult than it should have been.)

All in all, I’d recommend, and I may have to see about getting the first book to see how the story started. Mind you, this book is written with threads which, I assume, are meant to set up future books in the series. This isn’t a bad thing, but it just means that not every situation finds its resolution here.

Available in print and as ebook from Amazon, and in print from Barnes & Noble. Quite coincidentally, Ms. Larsen has another book in a different series that got released today.

(As an aside, I read this on my Nook HD+, which, despite being over a decade old, is still a fantastic device for reading.)

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