Review: Spinning Starlight by R.C. Lewis

Title: Spinning Starlight
Author: R.C. Lewis
Publisher: Disney Hyperion
Release date: October 6th 2015
Source: Netgalley
Format: eARC

Rating: 3/5

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Sixteen-year-old heiress and paparazzi darling Liddi Jantzen hates the spotlight. But as the only daughter in the most powerful tech family in the galaxy, it's hard to escape it. So when a group of men show up at her house uninvited, she assumes it's just the usual media-grubs. That is, until shots are fired.

Liddi escapes, only to be pulled into an interplanetary conspiracy more complex than she ever could have imagined. Her older brothers have been caught as well, trapped in the conduits between the planets. And when their captor implants a device in Liddi's vocal cords to monitor her speech, their lives are in her hands: One word and her brothers are dead.

Desperate to save her family from a desolate future, Liddi travels to another world, where she meets the one person who might have the skills to help her bring her eight brothers home-a handsome dignitary named Tiav. But without her voice, Liddi must use every bit of her strength and wit to convince Tiav that her mission is true. With the tenuous balance of the planets deeply intertwined with her brothers' survival, just how much is Liddi willing to sacrifice to bring them back?

Haunting and mesmerizing, this retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's The Wild Swans strings the heart of the classic with a stunning, imaginative world as a star-crossed family fights for survival in this companion to Stitching Snow. 

Spinning Starlight is the retelling of The Wild Swans a classic that although I have not read I did saw the anime as a child and is a story that I liked very much, because it isn´t a romance story, but a story about the love that a girl has for her siblings about how much she´s capable to sacrifice to save her brothers.

Liddi Jantzen is the heir of the most powerful technology company in the seven planets, accustomed to live surrounded by cameras all her life, to have her every day scrutinized by the media and living in the shadow of her eight incredible intelligent older brothers, they´re technological geniuses and at a very young age they have introduced technological innovations that have changed the various fields where their inventions had been applied and Liddi at her sixteen years old still haven´t achieved any of the greatness of her brothers and that frustrates her.

At the beginning of the plot Liddi learns that her brothers disappeared without a trace, and to then discover that they were kidnapped by someone she trusted, and later that person to control Liddi implant a device in her throat to prevent her from talking and obstructing their plans, because if she were to say a word that would send a signal to a device that would kill her brothers. So Liddi escape to another planet with the intention of finding some way to help her brothers, but she inadvertently ends on an unknown planet and once there she meets Tiav, which becomes an ally.

Liddi lives in a future where the writing is already obsolete, there are no books and everything is controlled by voice and video, which makes credible (in a way) that she can not communicate easily with others once she can not speak, but I got a little desperate when Tiav is trying to teach her to "write". Another thing that was really getting on my nerves was Liddi´s egocentricity, and that on several occasions when she is doing something that she would not normally do, she does a monologue on which she is imagining what the reporters would say about her "Liddi Jantzen did this .... Liddi Jantzen does the other .. " which after a while it was getting on my nerves.

In Spinning Starlight the romance takes a back seat and the main plot is Liddi doing everything possible to rescue her brothers, despite the consequences, and through retrospective scenes at the end of each chapter we get to see the strong bond that Liddi has with her older brothers.

Overall, is a fast-paced story and a good retelling of a classic that has not been exploited much, but it didn´t captived me, the world-building was vague and I skimmed over the scientific explanations because I did not understand much of it and I wasn´t as invested in the characters as I would want it to be.