A Moving and Immersive Anti-colonial Space Heist Adventure | Review: The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei

Author: Yume Kitasei
Edition: eARC
Publisher: Flatiron Books (June 11, 2024)
Genre: Adult, Sci-Fi

Synopsis

My Review of The Stardust Grail

The Stardust Grail is a captivating intergalactic anti-colonial heist adventure exploring existential questions on a cosmic scale with tenderness and humour alike.

I received a free digital eARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest and unbiased review

content warnings: violence and gore, xenophobia, xenocide, colonization, vomit, torture, war, infertility, chronic illness, confinement, suicidal thoughts (minor), pandemic, migraines

✨ ✨ ✨

I hope everyone is buckled in and ready for my thoughts on The Stardust Grail because folks, this review is a long one! I also hope you’re ready to listen to me scream about this book for the foreseeable future because it’s a 2024 favourite for sure and we all know I can’t shut up about the books that truly steal my heart!

This review is so lengthy in fact, that I have added a table of contents for you. Here you go, navigate around the subheadings to your heart’s content!

An Anticipated Release That Delivered on All Fronts

Yume Kitasei’s debut novel The Deep Sky was one of my absolute favourites of 2023. (psst you can find my review here!)

So naturally, as soon as I heard about her sophomore novel, I was in. I mean, a story pitched as a reverse Indiana Jones anti-colonial space heist can’t not catch my attention, right? And I am happy to inform you that yes, The Stardust Grail does in fact deliver on what it promises!

It is an anti-colonial space heist of intergalactic proportions that’ll grab you from the start and take you on a thrilling adventure. But The Stardust Grail is also so much more than a heist story. It’s funny and strange and tender and existential. In a truly magical feat, Yume Kitasei manages to seamlessly blend the vastness of existential questions with the close and character-focused journey of a lifetime. Fun space tech and alien civilisations meet the realities of colonisation and human greed, and somehow, despite the stakes and the bleakness of the future, Kitasei captures a sense of hope and awe that seeped into my very bones.

The Stardust Grail was one of the most immersive and thrilling reading experiences I had in a long time and I hope that my gushing about its brilliance convinces other readers to buckle in and experience a similar kind of adventure! This is by no means a full or even good expression of my thoughts on this book but I have to try. So let’s talk about some (mostly spoiler-free) details, shall we?

Get in Loser, We’re Returning Stolen Goods!

I love a heist story. The scheming and planning, the unexpected turns and high stakes – all of it is a perfect cocktail to have me at the edge of my seat. The Stardust Grail manages to be a heist within a heist within a heist, of sorts. While there are the actual heists (yes, technically there are multiple!), the whole book with its twists and turns feels like a heist on a cosmic scale, keeping the tension high. The stakes are so impossibly high, with the fate of civilisations at stake, and yet Kitasei manages to ground us in the small realities of the unlikely crew around Maya as they navigate these stakes.

I had a fantastic time reading all the heist scenes and waiting for the reveals of Maya’s plans, holding my breath when the characters were faced with new obstacles, and gasping at all the twists and turns. When I tell you that this is an adventure, I mean it! There’s so much fun world building and inventive technology that it’s a true delight to explore the expansive and immersive universe Kitasei has built here.

What drew me to this book (and probably you, too!) is the anti-colonial framing of the aforementioned heists. Maya specialises in stealing artifacts to return them to the civilisations they belong to. So really, is it even stealing if it didn’t belong to the place you’re taking it from in the first place? I don’t think so! This question of cultural ownership and where objects should be kept is a thread throughout the entire book, fuelling much of the conflict between Maya and her fellow humans. And it’s a conversation that’s clearly just as relevant in this science-fiction future as it is today, with western museums filled with looted artifacts.

While The Stardust Grail does provide some specifics of the colonial politics of the various civilisations we meet (though let’s be honest, it is once again humans who love to colonise in particular), its exploration of colonialism are more personal and visceral. It’s ultimately a story about the colonial violence inflicted on people when their culture, history, and knowledge are brutally destroyed and oppressed. There is a visceral sense of grief permeating every thread of this book that I couldn’t help but feel deeply as well in the face of so much loss and destruction.

Academia, Alien Worlds, and Awe

Despite the heavy themes, The Stardust Grail is a surprisingly hopeful book. Ultimately, this comes down to Kitasei’s ability to balance the elements of a story and not shy away from any aspects of the human condition. Yes, this future world and universe have many of the same issues our world has today. But there is always hope and humour to be found in the experiences of these characters as well.

I think much of this masterful balance in The Stardust Grail comes down to the incredible world building and the immersive sensory quality of Kitasei’s writing.

The Stardust Grail may be an adventure across galaxies and alien worlds, but it begins on Earth in a very particular setting: academia. As someone currently in the grips of academia themself, I found it incredibly entertaining to read about Maya’s academic struggles and experiences. In particular, because the experience of writing papers about a subject is contrasted so heavily with Maya’s past and future real-life experiences that are not easily flattened into peer-reviewed formats for publication. In general, I appreciated the commentary on the limits and problems of academia as a form of knowledge production and governance, especially in colonial contexts!

When interacting with various societies and civilisations, Maya’s academic knowledge takes a backseat to her lived experiences from past travels. And even those have limits. One of the big themes of The Stardust Grail is the question of how much we can truly ever understand each other across cultural boundaries and if there is such a thing as a universal theory of life. Ultimately, there are always miscommunications and aspects that remain unknown and unknowable, no matter how deep a personal connection might reach. This tension between the known and unknowable is one of the driving existential forces in The Stardust Grail.

One of my favourite parts of reading sci-fi is getting to explore different worlds and the author’s speculative visions of corners of our universe. And Yume Kitasei delivers! The universe she has created in The Stardust Grail is vibrant and expansive, filled with so many ideas and places that I wish I could’ve stayed there forever. To me, this sense of expansiveness and the need for me as a reader to want more is the hallmark of a great fictional world! Honestly, I would gladly read a whole series set in this universe, there is so much left to explore!

The fundamental feeling that to me encapsulates my reading experience best is awe. I was in awe of these new planets, their uniqueness and possibilities. I was in awe when faced with the sheer scale of this cosmos. And I was and still am in awe of Yume Kitasei’s craft as a writer, weaving together emotions and plot with an almost musical delicacy.

What’s a Person, Anyway?

I have spent a lot of time thinking and talking about the themes and the incredibly cool world building (and believe me, there is so much more I could say!). But I think it is time to honour some of the incredible characters The Stardust Grail delivers.

I loved Maya as our main character, she’s funny and clever and so so human. She makes mistakes, overestimates herself and has a very relatable existential crisis. I loved following her across the universe. One aspect of The Stardust Grail that I haven’t had a chance to mention yet is the role that Maya’s migraine induced dreams play as ominous premonitions throughout the book. This twisted dreamlike quality messing with our sense of time was incredibly well done and added a perpetual sense of dread at the things to come. I love when stories play with timelines and possibilities and this one does it so beautifully!

Speaking of timelines and possibilities, I adored Auncle, Maya’s alien friend and long-time heist buddy. Xe brought a non-human perspective to the story that adds to the galactic dimensions of this book. Xyr sense of emotion, time, and community is more expansive than our human one, which of course creates conflict but is also a beautiful reminder that consciousness and personhood is more vast than narrow human perspectives allow space for.

As a big fan of characters whose stories explore themes of identity, humanity, and bodily autonomy, I immediately fell in love with Wil and Medix. Apart from the conflict potential in having a former soldier and army robot on a mission with Maya who’s not too fond of either of them at the beginning, both those characters added a whole different layer to the existential questions of this book. What’s a person? Can we truly understand or even trust each other? What do we owe to our own species and ourselves?

It’s all so deliciously nuanced and I had such a great time following this most unlikely of space crews on their adventure.

Overall…

...if it wasn’t clear from all the rambling, I absolutely adored The Stardust Grail. Yume Kitasei has cemented herself as one of my all-time favourite authors with her imaginative and immersive writing that is so tender and hopeful, while not shying away from the darker aspects of humanity and bleak futures.

If you’re just scrolling down here, wondering what you can expect from The Stardust Grail, here’s a short version that barely scratches the surface of what this story is:

It really is an anti-colonial space museum heist but it also has: unlikely and complex friendships, discussions of cultural ownership, humanity, personhood at large, existential crises/dread, other civilisations across the galaxy, fun space science, shared consciousness, migraines, an accurate and funny depiction of the particular hell that is academia, wonderful writing and what has come to be my favourite aspect of Yume Kitasei’s writing craft: the ability to transport you into a different world as an all-encompassing sensory experience as you read.

This book is for you if…

…you like imaginative and expansive sci-fi stories and heist plots that go “fuck colonisers!”
…you are looking for a book that will immerse you with all your senses and transport you across the galaxy

A post you might also enjoy:

My review of Bluebird by Ciel Pierlot