For darkness shows the stars

This is a really hard book to review at all. I gave it 3 stars not because it's just average overall - it had aspects that I thought were impressive and well done, but also other aspects that ranged from tropey to lowkey problematic. Overall though, I think this was one of the best efforts at an Austen retelling I've read in a long time, even if it had its fair share of flaws. While the execution is a bit problematic, I have to give this book (and its author) props for being ambitious with the world and society it seeks to create and realistically transpose the story of Persuasion into.

I'll leave the better things to last to end this review on a more positive note, because while I'm not the biggest fan of this book, I do find the author, her writing, and her world-building to be very promising and want to keep up with her other books in future.

So... the things I didn't like.

The age of the characters were absolutely ridiculous and took a lot away from the retelling of a story like Persuasion. I know it's a thing for YA stories to age down their characters - a character could be behaving like an adult in an adult situation, but for some reason they're suddenly like 18-23 years old even though I can't imagine anyone in that age group behaving in that way. I usually can close an eye to this, but this decision in this book did not make sense imo.

Persuasion is a story about two people who did not make the best decisions and judgement calls when they were younger (I believe they were about 18 or slightly older in the original), and then they come together a whole decade later (in their late 20s to early 30s) after having been through life, accumulating experiences, and coming back together as more mature people who have come to recognise their own folly all those years ago but also the way the other person has grown as well in the interim. It's beautiful because it talks about second chances through maturity. In Darkness, the characters are aged down to a ridiculous extent. Our protagonists are only 18 years old in this story, and they were a paltry 14 years old when they made that decision to separate. Firstly, you cannot tell me that the mental growth and maturity between 18 and 28 in the original book can be equivalently compressed into that from 14 to 18 - it just does not make sense. Secondly, the fact that the protagonists in Persuasion were 18ish when they made that silly decision is testament to the general consensus that human beings are not at the peak of our maturity at 18 (it's physiological: our prefrontal cortices that make decisions and judgements in our brains does not fully mature until we are 25). I really cannot take a “second chance” love story seriously if the protagonists are getting back together at eighteen. After only four years. It really took some seriousness away from the retelling imo.

Also, in a slight spoiler, the fact that 18 year old Kai was romancing 14 year old Olivia was also really creepy imo. I know they kept repeating that it works differently for Posts and whatnot, but it's still creepy c'mon.

The romance was also pretty flat and tropey imo. I got pretty bored with the repetition of Elliot pining after Kai, and still pining after him literally despite every mean thing he does and says to her, and even after she tells herself for the millionth time how much she's over him. Their backstory is also built up by a series of letters that they have been exchanging since they were much younger children, and which intersperses the chapters. I'm not sure how effective a medium this was in building up that romance because honestly I was never really invested. I didn't really see a lot of chemistry in the letters, just perhaps some good friendship. Then we just get a lot of one-sided pining in the present time. As a result, I just found that I couldn't quite care much about how their romance was going to turn out.

One of the bigger eyesores in the book is the way it handles intellectual ableism and it's hard to explain this without explaining the whole society. This is hidden behind spoiler blocks just in case, but does not spoil the actual plot of the book and only explains the context of the world: Human beings were once split into two camps, one who tried to modify their own genes by a process called ERV which was meant to basically unlock all their latent potential and basically make them superhuman, and the other camp who believed that God-given DNA should not be messed with (the Luddites). The technology-loving camp, called “the Lost” by the Luddites, ended up with a major backlash from the ERV procedure which made their subjects “Reduced”, i.e. an intellectually challenged population unable to do much beyond manual labour and incapable of complex speech and thought. The Luddites see this as a sign of God smiting the Lost for daring to use technology and manipulate genes. A war and several generations later, the Luddites have “inherited the Earth” and make use of Reduced labour on their farms while also shunning technology and any kind of advancement. The Luddites adhere strictly to technology-shunning and strict social hierarchy “protocols” that they believe keeps them and humanity safe from another disaster like the Reduction. They believe the affliction of the Reduced is carried in their genes. In the present day, the Reduced have been increasingly giving birth to children who have ‘normal' levels of intellectual ability, who are called CORs (Children of Reduced) or Posts (Post-Reductionists) as they prefer. Despite this, they are typically still treated the same as the Reduced with the same rights. Many Posts escape the estates that they were born in and form Post enclaves, which has its own social problems.

If any of the above sounds uncomfortable to you or is a trigger, then this is not a book you should read. It certainly does give a suitable pretext for Elliot (a Luddite) and Kai (a Post) to conceivably have that distance in hierarchy that prevents them from having a socially sanctioned union, much like how Anne and Capt Wentworth did as well in Persuasion. But while Anne and Capt Wentworth's troubles lay in a relatively simple socioeconomic class hierarchy prevalent in their society, the objections to Elliot and Kai's relationship stems from a much, much more problematic society that the author is building here, complete with intellectual ableism, segregation, slavery, and religious zealotry that exaggerates a science vs religion dichotomy. It is an incredibly ambitious world and honestly was just uncomfortable to read sometimes. It adds a lot more gravity and heaviness to Persuasion, which looks almost light-hearted in comparison and that's saying a lot given that Persuasion is often seen as the most serious of Austen's books. But oddly enough, despite the gravity of the issues presented, the problematic-ness of the society still isn't adequately confronted by the author (but not completely ignored either) since this is still a YA romance after all so there is some preoccupation with the pining and love lines here.

But I guess in this flaw I found something positive. Most Austen retellings are simply a rehash of the original story in a conveniently contrived and unrealistic transposition to another time/setting/world. Although I had a lot of things to complain and lament about the world and society that the author builds here, I have to give props to her for having been able to come up with what must have been a very ambitious AU to conceivably squeeze a Persuasion story into. The world was more fleshed out than most Austen retellings are, and didn't feel contrived. I still remain impressed by the ambition that drove the world-building here, and if the author had perhaps chosen a different route to establishing class hierarchy instead of with intellectual ableism, it would certainly be deserving of an even higher rating.

The author's writing was also pretty good, certainly better than average. There's nothing too cringey about her syntax or tone, which is a common problem with many YA stories. I did find that the pacing could have been a little faster and some parts felt a bit draggy, but the storytelling in itself was pretty smooth and easy to read.

I'm pretty interested to see where this author is going to and will check out her other works.