I did not finish reading the book so I can't write a truthful review. the subject and characters seem so likeable I can't imagine not liking it. I would like to go back to it later.

I liked the premise of this book, and it contains interesting psychological themes. However, the main character and the romance plot did not grab me. I enjoyed the setting, premise, and subject matter, but not the characters.

I honestly thought this would just be another space themed sci-fi novel, but I was pleasantly surprised! The characters were well-written, which made me even more intrigued. I can’t wait to read more from this author.

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley.

This was a difficult story for me to get into (as evidenced by how long it took me to read it - normally I can finish a book this length in 1-2 days). It wasn't bad, it just wasn't intriguing enough for me. I cared very little what happened to the main character, Jamie, because she didn't seem to care herself. She was so hung up on all of her own insecurities and heartbreaks that she failed to consider that others have experienced the same or similar circumstances; feelings of isolation are not unique to her. She intentionally pushes people away who are actively trying to help her instead of accepting help, and whines when they stop trying. The other characters were difficult for me to distinguish between because I don't feel they were fully fleshed out. I can normally vividly imagine the characters and events in a story, and this book was difficult for me to do that with because I don't feel like I ever got to know any of the characters.

This is a slow paced novel in which very little truly happens. It may be something others enjoy immensely; it just was not for me.

The Space Between the Stars intrigued me, like a lot of science fiction/post-apocalyptic novels do. However, this one just did not measure up. I found the tone of the book almost whiny at times. I think that is a direct reflection of my feelings toward the main character,

Unfortunately I just could not get into this story. It ended up on my Did Not Finish pile.

Though I liked the book, I made the decision at the time I finished not to review it on my site. Maybe in the future I will include it in a book list post or another article.

What would a YA book look like if instead of being written for angst-ridden teen girls it was targeted for adults who wish they were angst-ridden teen girls? It would look a lot like <em>The Space Between the Stars</em> by Anne Corlett.

Jamie Allenby wants some alone time and to achieve this end, she leaves the over-crowded Earth and takes a job on a far-away planet in one of the most remote areas she can find. But then a virus plaque hits Earth wiping out most of the population and suddenly Jamie comes realize just how alone she actually is as she tries and tries to make contact with any other human beings. Finally she receives a strange message. It's distorted, but she realizes that it means someone is still alive on Earth and reaching out.

Conveniently, a ship is passing through and picks up Jamie and she and this motley assortment of what's left of humanity work their way back to Earth and they discuss and plan for their work to renew life on Earth, but they don't all agree on how best to move forward - some cling to old ways even though there's nothing left to cling to. Others want to reach out in new ways, but all can't quite grasp what that might be and they can't agree on the different possibilities. Jamie struggles to comprehend the massive elimination of humanity.

This book is full of pathos, angst, and reflection - three traits common in certain popular styles of YA fiction but not really quite so enjoyable here. Did I mention there's a lot of 'reflection' here? The entire novel seems to have no focus other than to reflect on "what if you wanted to be alone and actually got what you were wishing for?"

A book that is going to be about reflecting on loss needs to have something to keep the reader interested, which boils down to a strong character. But Jamie tends to wallow in self-pity even though she puts herself into whatever situation she finds herself in and then complains about how terrible everything is. We probably all know people like that and probably don't enjoy being around those people, and typically we don't like reading about them very much either.

Looking for a good book? The Space Between the Stars by Anne Corlett is a slow-moving story about one woman coming to comprehend the end of all humanity and is probably only for readers who enjoy reading about others who have problems worse than their own.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

WHY DID I LISTEN TO THE SPACE BETWEEN THE STARS BY ANNE CORLETT?
The Space Between The Stars by Anne Corlett has an absolutely glorious cover. I mean, the cover is blue and pink and science fiction oriented. OF COURSE I was interested. OF COURSE. Granted, this book was pitched to me with some comparisons to sci-fi movies that I have not seen. Still, I grabbed it off Netgalley because I generally like books from this publisher – Berkley. Alas, I did not make it a priority because of all these other competing interests. The moment I saw this audiobook available on Scribd though, I got super excited. So, I listened to it because I am trying to whittle down my eARCs but also because I wanted something different from the YA and contemporary adult fiction books I have been devouring.

WHAT’S THE STORY HERE?
Anne Corlett’s debut is about a woman named Jamie who lives on another planet. Jamie has survived a virus that has decimated the majority of the human population. She’s emigrated from Earth — however, unlike other people, she went willingly. She had served as a veterinarian. Anyways, so she and a group of other survivors band together and journey back to Earth when they get a garbled radio signal that other people may be alive. As it turns out, one of those people may be from Jamie’s past. Sooo, this book delves a little bit into miscarriage and I want to bring that up because I know for some people it is hard to read about that. That’s essentially the whole gist. But also, we see the survivors in The Space Between The Stars really cling to their ways – ie religious people being super religious, etc.

HOW DID I LIKE THE SPACE BETWEEN THE STARS?
Honestly, this book wasn’t super memorable or all that great to me. I did find it hard to listen to the bits on her miscarriage — not that I have experienced a miscarriage. Just, I don’t know, it was difficult. There’s a few characters that are kind of interesting. We get to see some intersectionality as the book covers racism and ableism. On the whole though, I just didn’t feel a whole huge amount of interest for this book while listening.

HOW’S THE NARRATION?
The Space Between The Stars audiobook is narrated by Mary Woodvine. I’ve never heard her narration before now. Will I actively search out books narrated by her? Probably not, no. I have nothing to complain about or no real particular dislikes. However, there’s also nothing that really WOWed me with the narration as well. I think that also I may just not be a science fiction person whether that is via print or via audio.

Two stars, according to the official scale of Goodreads, means "it was okay." That's.... pretty much how I feel about The Space Between the Stars and that's being pretty generous.

Despite an impressive summary and good start this novel quickly emerges as exceedingly average when it wasn't being preachingly pedantic. There are some good bones and good ideas in Anne Corlett's odd science fiction tale, but they do tend to get lost in the morass and the dull nature of the narration. The main character is hard to invest in or to even generally care about; I don't need to like a character but I do need to be interested in their story. That was not the case with Jamie. She's whiny and spoiled; instead of rooting for her it's more likely to go the opposite way.

The main thing The Space Between the Stars has going for it is the plot's framework. It's an interesting plot and though Corlett doesn't do all she could with the premise, there are a few decent plot reveals and resolutions. It's not enough to compensate for the utter lack of character charisma but it does make the novel at least palatable enough to finish.

Good premise, but not for me. The main character was so annoying, I couldn't connect with her at all. I just couldn't get into it honestly.

THE SPACE BETWEEN THE STARS is a romance in dystopian disguise. Emotion and introspection drive the novel. After a flu wipes out 99.9% of the human race, the few survivors band together to find other survivors and a new place to call home. Humanity is spread out on different space stations, but that isolation turns out to be what saves so many of the characters.

The story focuses on Jamie’s desires and conflicted emotions as she goes from isolated to living on a small ship. She has her own goals and unwittingly invites the other passengers along. Before the flu, society had been divided into tiered, denoted by rings that the characters wear. Jamie is from the upper class, and although she was an activist, she is just beginning to understand how privileged her life was.

Since the novel is more romance than sci-fi, there wasn’t as much investigation into the other poorer colonies. Rather than focusing on the rebuilding of a small society in space, integrating the different class levels, and fighting the new bureaucracy, THE SPACE BETWEEN THE STARS pivots completely and heads down to hunker on earth.

If you’re looking for more plot and sci-fi elements, you may be disappointed by the novel’s quiet pace. The writing, the characterization, and the romance in THE SPACE BETWEEN THE STARS are all beautifully written and engaging. It’s a lovely novel that confronts anxiety, forgiveness, and death.

Normally I love this genre but I just couldn't get into this one.

Stevie‘s review of The Space Between the Stars by Anne Corlett
Science Fiction published by Berkley 13 Jun 17

As a fan of both post-apocalyptic stories and space operas, particularly the subgenre in which a small group of travellers face off against the authorities, any story that combines the two is bound to appeal to me. In this particular fusion of SF elements, another personal favourite, the near-future scenario also plays a significant role in the author’s worldbuilding and in the characters’ backgrounds. We aren’t given a precise date when the story takes place, but many of the characters’ possessions and surroundings feel very familiar – both initially when we meet them on a distant planet and later when they return to Earth. The heroine’s longstanding issues: a disintegrating relationship following the in utero death of her unborn child and her need to keep working, even as she deals with her emotional crises, also feel very grounded in the present, even as we watch her tackle issues beyond any that a reader might feasibly encounter.


We first meet Jamie as she is recovering from a severe viral illness that has spread across every human settlement in the galaxy, proving fatal in almost all cases and reducing its victims’ bodies to a handful of dust. Emerging from the cottage in which she has isolated herself, Jamie finds that no one else amongst her co-workers has survived the infection, but is given hope by discovering a faint recorded message that may have been sent by her estranged lover. The two had once (not entirely seriously) promised each other that should the worst ever happen and humanity be wiped out, they would find each other again on the stretch of Northumberland coastline where Jamie grew up. And so Jamie sets out in search of other survivors, ideally those who might possess the means to take her off the planet where she has been living and working, then onwards to Earth.

The group Jamie eventually finds herself part of is very reminiscent of the short-lived TV series, Firefly, right down to the unorthodox preacher, the captain with hidden angst and his female second-in-command who is fiercely loyal but unafraid of speaking her mind, and the former sex-worker trying to figure out her role in this new reality. Although Captain Callan is at first reluctant to involve himself in Jamie’s quest, encounters with other groups trying to rebuild civilisation in their own dysfunctional ways convince him that Earth may be the best destination for him, at least to begin with.

When Jamie, Callan, and their companions reach Earth, however, their problems are far from over – just altered – some survivors have made difficult choices in order to ensure that their lives have continued, and at least one of Jamie’s own group is being less than honest about their past deeds and future plans. Although I had to suspend my disbelief at times to make the situation on Earth fit with the backstory to humanity’s quest for new homes on distant planets, I found myself caught up in the mysteries surrounding both the virus’ origins and Jamie’s secretive companions. Not a perfect book by any means, but I’ll be looking out for whatever the author produces for us next.

Grade: B

When I was reading Anne Corlett’s stellar (pun intended) The Space Between the Stars, I couldn’t help but think of Emma Pierson’s stirring April 2017 article in Wired titled "Hey, Computer Scientists! Stop Hating on the Humanities". In this piece, the author makes her case for why it’s simply not enough to focus on who can create the best code -- that if we abandon the study of the humanities altogether, we will lose sight of the very real societal functions and human costs that the newest advances in technology portend.

As Pierson succinctly puts it: “I’ve watched military scientists present their lethal innovations with childlike enthusiasm while making no mention of whom the weapons are being used on. There are few things scarier than a scientist who can give an academic talk on how to shoot a human being but can’t reason about whether you should be shooting them at all.” The idea that science is founded solely on reason and truth is a faulty one, as the unaddressed and implicit biases of the researchers and developers who create our medicines and build our devices come to play a staggeringly large role in the final products. In order for technological advances to truly bring positive change to people’s lives, the individuals responsible for engineering these advances cannot afford to only ask whether we can do or make something, but also if we even should in the first place.

I hope I haven’t spoiled too much of The Space Between the Stars with that line of thought. But the nature of the story Corlett has chosen to tell raises these questions in a more grounded and poignant way than I could have hoped for. Carefully balancing the demands of narrative, characterization, and theme, Corlett has created a thrilling and memorable story.

The plot details are rather basic: in the very far future, a virus with a nearly perfect kill rate has devastated humanity, scattered as it is across myriad planets. Passed on by contact, the virus has the effect of destroying the body from the inside out, basically withering bodies away into piles of dust. Jamie, a veterinary scientist on one of the outer planets and the protagonist, manages to survive her bout with the virus and soon comes across a band of survivors as they all try to make their way back to the inner planets, the home of the elites, to see who else has survived.

The characters themselves are largely well-drawn; Jamie is particularly compelling, even if she doesn’t always come off well. Her discomfort with getting too close even to the people she loves is certainly relatable, as is her desire, in the wake of the virus, to find the partner she left behind and to try and make their relationship work.

The survivors include Rena, a scientist and religious fanatic; Lowry, a kindly elderly preacher; and Callan, the no-nonsense, brooding captain of the spaceship transporting everyone on their journey. At times the narrative can feel episodic and meandering, as Jamie and Callan and the rest stop on several other planets to find survivors; then wind up on Alegria, one of the upper-echelon planets, where the surviving upper-classes have basically instituted fascism; to Earth, where Jamie was born and raised. Yet each planet and locale that the survivors come across is written well enough that they certainly don’t blend together, making it easy to tie the memory of a certain location with a step in Jamie’s ultimate character development and growing understanding of the world she has grown up in, and the consequences that world now must face.

The most unfortunate thing I can say about these characters, and of the general world-building of The Space Between the Stars as a whole, is that it really does resemble the sci-fi cult classic TV show Firefly in a lot of ways: here we have a raggedy spaceship with a mysterious-but-attractive captain (Callan / Mal), a preacher with plenty of secrets (Lowry / Shepherd Book), and a gentle, beguiling sex worker (Mila / Inara), all within the context of a sinister governmental and societal system that is highly stratified and fond of scientific experimentation. Indeed, The Space Between the Stars could adapt well to the silver screen only if pains were taken to completely avoid the aesthetic of Firefly and its companion film Serenity.

Yet it’s Rena, the desperate believer and former eugenics scientist from the upper class, who manifests both the scientific and spiritual aspects that work so well in The Space Between the Stars and represents the central theme of the novel. As the survivors turn out to be individuals that Rena deems undesirable -- Mila, the aforementioned sex worker, a disabled young man named Finn -- the reader comes to the realization that Rena’s life’s work and her belief that the virus -- and the loss of nearly all humanity -- is God’s will for a “brave new world” are much more twisted and entangled than previously indicated. We find out the truth of it all in bits of flashbacks and information about forced emigration programs from Earth, the scientific campaigns to prevent the less-desirable populations from reproducing -- and the horrible truth is somehow both shocking and not really shocking at all.

I’m in the position of not wanting to reveal too much more about The Space Between the Stars because I don’t want to spoil it. Suffice it to say that Corlett has, in what is an impressively rich debut novel, crafted a tale chock-full of emotional resonance and haunting significance -- and due warning -- for the future of science.

Corlett's apocalyptic sci-fi novel takes on the task of how to rebuild humanity and recreate yourself in the aftermath of a widespread plague. She peers into the human soul to see how different people would respond to such an event, and mixes that deep insight with fantastic world-building.

I found this debut novel to fall into the rare category of being slowly paced but yet page-turning. There were not a lot of things going on but I remained very interested in the relationships between the characters and how their travels would change them. I'm going to be happy to recommend this to customers looking for something out of the ordinary!

I am a big fan of sci-fi and post-apocalyptic novels. This isn't one. Sure, it LOOKS like one on the surface - but at the core of it, this is a whiny annoying book about a whiny annoying woman who is emotionally stuck in one of the most pathetic romantic relationships to be committed to paper. The outer-space setting is just veneer; and illogical veneer at that. It would've made more logical sense if the different planets were just New York and California, or example.

When we meet Jamie Allenby, she's "taking a break" from her relationship, because she "needs some space." ("Space," haha.) She's out working on a frontier planet, an isolated location, which is lucky for her, because a terrible virus rages through known space, and a quirk of the illness is that you you have contact with anyone else while you're ill, you will definitely die. Those who are totally isolated have a chance of recovery. Jamie survives, and instead of bucking up, buckling down, and working on survival, develops an obsession with finding her estranged boyfriend.

Through an unlikely coincidence, she manages to get herself on a spaceship heading her way, along with an assorted bunch of other eccentric survivors. But that is not the end of unlikely coincidences! Far from it!

I shouldn't really say more, because, spoilers, but even with the author's explanations, there are just too many coincidences in this book, all designed to give our protagonist plenty of opportunity to dredge up all the hurts and grudges of her past, moan about lost opportunities, fertility issues, and get a romance triangle shoehorned in there.

It feels like the book is aiming for being an insightful look into the human heart, through the lens of the "women's fiction" genre, while picking up on the popularity of post-apocalyptic fiction. But, to me, it just felt shallow and rather unexciting. And annoying.

Many thanks to Pan Macmillan & NetGalley for the opportunity to read. Sorry I didn't like it.

"when a devastating virus reduces most of humanity to dust and memories"
This line is the reason I picked up this book but the virus that devastates humanity doesn't ever take center stage in this story. Waking up to being completely alone and not finding another living soul anywhere had to be difficult but, Jamie Allenby was one of the most insufferable protagonists that I've read as of late. There just wasn't enough science in this science fiction novel.

Jamie Allenby leaves Earth and her long-term boyfriend to live on a frontier world with plenty of space. Then the virus hits, and she finds herself completely alone, with only dust and memories. The survival probability statistics are zero point zero zero zero one, and when she receives a garbled message from Earth, she reconsiders her feelings of her boyfriend and family in the wake of humanity’s disaster. Together with a few other survivors, she travels home for the promise of a new beginning on Earth.

The Space Between the Stars is a poetic introspective journey that happens to take place against the backdrop of a post-apocalyptic voyage through the vastness of space. Jamie’s emotional arc is the heart of the story, and when she finds a balance between too little space and too much space, seeking a home and finding one, the personal journey is quite fulfilling. The backdrop of humanity’s collapse simplifies need and desire, allowing ordinary people to find meaning in their own tiny lives.

Unfortunately, the personal journey is too familiar, and the plot that supports it too convenient. I do enjoy the slow reveal of Jamie’s family history, but her wafting feelings for her previous lover are tedious. She doesn’t even really make up her own mind about him, until his strong actions make it clear what the decision should be. To that end, Jamie is excessively moody and broody throughout the entire novel, with an occasional pang of guilt for her high social station, so she’s not all that pleasant a protagonist.

Recommended for fans of literary fiction who don’t mind a few science fiction elements on the side.

Thanks to Netgalley and Berkley Publishing for a free copy in exchange for an honest review!

Human interactions in a possible end of the world situation. Humans must learn to interact in a more deliberate manner.