In a very general way this book is about heart-wrenching lies, growth and societal change. What an unusual and intriguing premise for a book. It blends fantasy and mystery so perfectly that I was instantly invested in the characters. Even though parts are hard to read, the story is an important one. There are triggers for rape, being drugged and general misogynistic behavior but this book is so carefully and beautifully written that my advice is to still give it a shot. It shows the progression a girl takes from naive child to strong woman, overcoming all her familial and personal obstacles in a way that has meaning for us all. This is a book that'll stay with me for a while and those are always the best. I'll be pre-ordering myself a hardcopy.

"You are free. You are wild. You are, now and in the future, entirely your own."

Thank you so much Sarah Thegeby from Penguin Group for allowing me to review this amazing book early. I'll be posting my 5 star review on my Bookstagram main page and under the 5 star highlights for the next year. It'll also be on Twitter, Goodreads and after publication Amazon.

Thank you NetGalley and the Publisher for gifting me this ARC, it definitely wasn't one I was expecting.
This is a different look of a dystopian spin of how freckles on women have different meanings. This book was intense and had some underlying dangerous topics it explores. Definitely some toxic masculinity in this one. Not for everyone, but a good read.

Body of Stars by Laura Maylene Walter is a strong written book. Which feels like a dystopia but the people it feels are in a unique Utopia.

The Women in this area and girl to women life style you are called changelings. You are born with marks that predict your life, career, lifestyle and more. The in between change is where things can happen such as abduction where you will be in ruin. ( Kidnapped, raped, forced assault) even if it isn't your fault they deem it is.

The Government has a Humanitarian Global alliance to try to promote equal rights. However, if you are ruined you lose a chance at careers, jobs etc. There is an office of future predictions which keeps tracks of women and girls body marks. It's a Womens job office of interpretation.

There changelings before they mature into Women and since they have body markings and the men don't the women have to dress chastely. Also it effects your family on how you are being treated if you are ruined. They don't go after an assaulter just contribute it as your fault, you enticed them.

The Celeste has a Brother Miles and he is really into interpretation and how it can be general and on it. How they're lives changed drastically constantly change and how people seem to treat family dynamics is kind of weird.

I’m judging a 2021 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

“From the time of my birth my brother Miles read me like a map, tracing my patterns of freckles and birthmarks to see my future and to learn something of his own.” -I know this is the very first sentence but from the onset, the images the chapter breaks with the maps of the constellations it’s stunning—which is how it ought to be. A captivating reading experience.

BODY OF STARS by Laura Maylene Walter just wasn’t for me at all. I had seen this one on Dutton Books Instagram as a read now on NetGalley and from their caption I was interested. If I had known it was a dystopian fiction then I wouldn’t have even decided to read it in the first place. This book further confirms that I don’t enjoy dystopian books. I had read a couple last year and they were alright but this one pushes it to the extreme and I just powered through reading it. I wasn’t at all curious how it would end and I really didn’t care for the ending. Right away I couldn’t get past how women were treated in this book. They had to submit to inspections of their bodies during puberty and fear abduction and rape. If you’re a fan of this genre then you’ll probably love this book. I’m kinda still hopeful one day a dystopian book will surprise me.
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Thank you to Dutton Books via NetGalley for my advance review copy!

This was a beautiful and thought provoking speculative fiction novel. It felt very easy to grasp the main concept of the novel and be able to focus on the story itself. So much care and detail went into the author's creation of diagrams and language around the main concept, and it was a very compelling read.

This is an imaginative story of a world that seems quite realistic except that females know their destiny because of the markings on their bodies. Imagine if a mole here or there on you predicted your future with certainty: career, marriage, family, health. At a certain time in their teens, girls would become women and their permanent markings would be revealed. During the few weeks surrounding this dramatic event, girls' senses would be heightened, as would males' responses to them, putting them in extreme danger. Celeste and her brother Miles anxiously awaited her passage, and when it happened their world turned upside down. At one point Celeste considers the possibility of a world where women do not know their fate, and imagines only that they must feel rudderless and lost. Thought-provoking indeed.

a unique look into a dystopian world where freckles on a girl indicate many different things. It was hard to read about the danger they were in but I found it intriguingly written.

The genre of feminist dystopia is still going strong. but it's becoming harder for stories to differentiate themselves from their peers. Coupled with a growing fatigue towards "trauma porn," how many more books about women trying to survive under the weight of the patriarchy can we take?

"Body of Stars" certainly stands out for its fantasy-bent plot: in another world, quite like ours, girls are born with marks that when interpreted correctly, predict the future. Their marks are much like baby teeth: after a certain age, they disappear and are replaced by permanent, more accurate, marks. This process temporarily transforms a girl into a changeling - a kind of mystical superhuman with heightened senses. It also makes her incredibly alluring to the men around her. She runs the risk of "being taken," a euphemism for being kidnapped and assaulted. Once taken, a changeling becomes a pariah: she can no longer go to university or hold any social standing.

It is against this desolate backdrop that we are introduced to Celeste, who must reckon with her own "taking" and the terrifying mark on her body predicting her twin brother's imminent death. The story starts off quite slow, taking its time to establish the rules and customs of this new world. Things start picking up halfway through and I found myself rooting for Celeste and her awakening towards rape culture and gender norms.

The social commentary is nuanced and complicated: Celeste's world is inconsistent (provides birth control and lauds itself as progressive, yet blames women for being taken) and upholds a bizarre view of the human body (a miracle of fortunetelling, yet so easily emptied of its value). There are no clear answers but the reader is left with a sense of hope and closure. This is no feminist revenge story (like "The Nowhere Girls") and certainly not a feel-good girl-power story. It's wildly creative and weird, and intensely unsettling. I don't know if this is the kind of book one says they enjoy. However, I can say for certain that it gave me a lot to think about and I'm thankful the author didn't fall for the tropes of the genre.

Content warning: rape, kidnapping, assault, revenge porn (when taken, a girl will often times have an erotic tarot card crafted in her likeness and distributed by her attacker).

Compelling YA fiction, for younger readers who will go on to be fans of Handmaid's Tale, Power & Vox.

For current fans of Hunger Games.

Enjoyable, would recommend for readers ages 12+.