Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing this eARC.

The Stars Too Fondly follows space geek Cleo and her friends who, in the year 2061, accidentally steal a spaceship while attempting to unravel the mystery behind the disappearance of its crew twenty years prior.

Part romance, part space odyssey, and all heart, The Stars Too Fondly was a solid read that I think will worm its way into a lot of readers' hearts. The group of friends we journey with was vibrant and interesting to read about, and the compelling mystery that drove the plot kept me practically glued to the page. While I do have some qualms with a few choices that were made along the way -- I love TikTok as much as the next person, but if it's still a popular app in 40 years I will weep tears of sorrow -- I overall loved this high-stakes and incredibly fun read. I'd also like to specifically note that I love the way it ended, because more and more I feel like narratives don't take their time near the end. The ending to this book, though, felt remarkably well-paced, and I was happy to be able to settle into the idea of our cast's futures before the final page.

Rating: 4.5 Stars

CW: Kidnapping; confinement; death; grief

Emily Hamilton’s debut perfectly blends sci-fi, mystery, and romance in an incredibly moving and addicting story. I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect when I started The Stars Too Fondly, but I was quickly hooked, and I loved that this book kept me on the edge of my seat with the plot and the romance! If you’re looking for a fantastic sapphic sci-fi romance, this is it!

I was a big fan of the TV show The 4400 back in the day, and this gave me similar vibes. While I had to suspend my disbelief a bit about some of the sci-fi aspects (dark matter! Multiverses? Physics!), I was incredibly wrapped up in the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the Providence crew all those years ago. I literally could not wait to see what happened to them and how it fit into Cleo and the gang’s story.

I love how the book’s narrative structure played out: We had the current-day POV, a mysterious narrator’s POV, and then snippets from archived messages and articles from the days leading up to the Providence launch. Together, those three narrative pieces worked perfectly to tell the story in a way that kept you guessing and on the edge of your seat. It was such a unique way to tell the story, but also incredibly effective. I also loved how the narrative structure helped develop the central romance between Billie and Cleo, but I don’t want to say too much about that because of spoilers.

I must admit, Cleo wasn’t necessarily my favorite, but I was drawn to Billie instantly. Cleo was a bit too optimistic for me, especially in the beginning. Her actions got her friends into this mess, and I felt she wasn’t empathizing with her friends’ reactions. But she grew on me more as the story developed, but she was never my favorite. She’s a bit rash and rushes into things without thinking, but she also does care for her friends and family, which is her saving grace. She’s also incredibly smart, and I honestly don’t know who else could have figured out everything that was going on besides her.

Meanwhile, I loved Captain Wilhelmina Lucas, aka Billie, from the start. I’m much more like her than Cleo as she’s more of a grump and sarcastic, while Cleo is the sunshine and optimist. Billie was a fascinating character. She’s a hologram, but she has all the memories of the real Billie and feels like a real person, not a computer. Getting to know the hologram Billie and the real Billie through the archived messages was amazing, and I really connected with her. She’s suffered a lot of loss in her life, which really shaped her as a person, and the relationship she had with her brother, who was also a part of the Providence crew, was incredibly sweet. I felt so bad for hologram Billie at times as she had to reckon with the fact that the crew of the Providence disappeared, but she’s a hologram so she’s not real. It’s complicated but so well executed.

Rounding out the main cast are Cleo’s friends Ros, Kaleisha, and Abe, each with their own skills that prove very useful for accidentally getting launched into space for a long time. I enjoyed the found family aspects of their friendship, but I also would have liked to get to know them a little bit more, as it did feel a little surface-level.

The romance in this was SO GOOD. It’s also extremely complicated and impossible because Billie is a hologram. But the emotions between Cleo and Billie are very, very real – so real that they feel as if they can transcend time and space. They had great chemistry from the start, and I loved watching them navigate their feelings. It’s emotional, beautiful, and romantic – all the things I want from a romance.

I was surprised at just how emotional I was at the end of the story, as I didn’t realize how invested I was in these characters and their journey until then. While this is a sci-fi story, at its core, it’s about love in all its many forms and the power of that love. It’s a story with so much heart. The ending perfectly encapsulated that and left me emotional in the best way, with many happy tears in my eyes. So do yourself a favor and read it!

If you’re looking for a fantastic sci-fi, LGBTQ romance from a debut author that will give you all the feels, then pick up The Stars Too Fondly!

Thank you to Harper Voyager/Netgalley for the ARC. All thoughts, ideas. and opinions expressed in this review are my own.

Who is ready for a sapphic rom-com in space?! This joyoys debut from Emily Hamilton is a thrill to read from start to finish.

I was drawn into Cleo and Billie's orbit by their witty banter and intricate relationship that blooms over the course of the engine visit gone wrong. The surprises are plentiful and the found family of a crew is a joy as the ship cruises towards risks abound.

I was drawn in when Cleo touched that engine and I couldn't put it down for one minute-- you'll love it!

While I largely enjoyed this story, I definitely felt a bit blindsided by the resolution and the ultimate antagonist of the story. The concept was really fun, and I did like that there was as lot of queer representation, but I will say that it could be hard to differentiate between characters at times because they all had a really similar style of humor and talking. Similarly, I think that the establishment of place in this story was a bit rough--this story takes place 40 years in the future but I found that so many of the references were pointing to right now. It was a little distracting, but I also can't fathom that in 40 years any of this will be feasible. Ultimately, I enjoyed the reading experience of this, but I do wish that it had been either farther in the future/had less references that point to the 2000s with no call-out of them being retro or boomer-y, and that the characters were a little more delineated. I did enjoy this, though, so even with its flaws this was still fun and spacey.

This book was a fun sci-fi adventure. I didn't expect a lot of the twists within the story and was shocked at how some parts of it ended. There is a definite Interstellar vibe to it that was also really enjoyable. Even though the characters are stuck in a situation they weren't ready for, I found that most of them handled it pretty well. I do sometimes wish I got more about the side characters but really enjoyed following Cleo and Billie's story. I did think Billie was also an interesting character, and liked how love was portrayed within the text.

3.5 that I have to round down for just how out of nowhere the antagonist and resolution feel. I love the concept, of accidentally activating a spaceship whose crew disappeared to the exploration of so many different relationships, romantic and platonic, and the whole spectrum of queer. It's really clear that Hamilton had a blast writing this, and it's hard not to feel excited or invested when it radiates of each page.

There are some things that part of me wants to let slide because it's a debut, but ended up getting under my skin enough that I can't. There's a mix of narration styles, from using articles to transcripts of videos to chat logs to a weird omniscient third-person narrator (who keeps breaking the fourth wall and at one point calls themselves out for being a weird omniscient third-person narrator), but there's nothing really tying it together as to why we're utilizing all of these different styles. Everyone has the exact same style of typing and sense of humor in the chat logs (and at times when they're all talking with each other to the point that it was down to pronouns to differentiate who was doing or saying what), and despite taking place in 2061, the media references (and at one baffling point, a TikTok callout) are all nerd properties or arguments or memes that could be pulled from the 2010s. It's not that I mind it so much, but when every piece of media is one nerds in their 30s are talking about /now/, and no one calls them retro or classic and somehow everyone knows and acknowledges them as relevant with only one piece of media with a character reason why they've fixated on an older movie, it's a weird sort of whiplash. It just made it really hard for me to place the characters in their time instead of ours, which then made it harder to make the scientific and environmental leaps.

I also have a few qualms about letting the "rom-com" part of this slide - while there's definitely a romance developing between Cleo and Billie, it's nowhere in the "rom-com" territory. It's much more their romance is part of the core in trying to figure out what they're going to do about accidentally ending up on a ship with a 7 year itinerary, what these weird powers are, and just why Billie, as a computer hologram, is so realized and who set that up. They do also jump from "attracted to each other" to "love more than anything else" very quickly, but that's a your mileage may vary depending on your tolerance/familiarity with romance plotlines.

Mostly I feel like there were a lot of moments where the characters and their relationships were meant to carry the weight of each of the actions and consequences, and that really didn't pan out. Instead we get a lot of exposition and a lot of telling of how things happen, which unfortunately culminate in the most whiplash moment, the antagonist reveal. The antagonist has the most cardboard cutout reasoning for why they need the dark matter drive and why they need Cleo and her friends and a lot of it feels completely out of nowhere and opposite of what we'd seen from anyone at all so far. It just feels like it's what the story needed, rather than actually coming from a character moment or motivation. It feels a lot like the whole setup of "oh the Providence I crew disappeared and then everyone just suddenly got scared of space travel". You have to go with it because the story requires it, but the idea that scientists who have been working on something for decades just...drop a huge, necessary project because they're scared of it happening again or companies are scared of losing money is...laughable. Especially if we're also supposed to believe that Cleo's generation grew up as extremely interested in STEM but it's still been another 20 years and nothing else has progressed? It just all felt flimsy, which was a bad start and lowered my investment and expectations.

I received an ARC from the publisher and am voluntarily posting a review. All opinions are my own.
I had no idea what I was getting into when I picked up The Stars Too Fondly, beyond it being a sapphic science fantasy rom-com, but I ended up being delighted by this. I did find the narrative style a tad jarring at first, as it utilizes a mix of prose and mixed-media, reflective of the fact that one of the protagonists is a hologram. As much as I love mixed-media presentation, the way some of it was included made for a clunky read at first. Not to mention, one of the main characters also is addressed a few different ways, from a formal full name to a nickname, and it was a lot to take in. But as the story went on, I ended up really enjoying it.
The world building is fairly light, beyond being in the near-future in space, and conveying bits that are relevant to the narrative, and while the story involves astrophysics, the story isn’t bogged down by the technicalities of it all, especially as things get a bit messier in deep-space.
Cleo is a solid human protagonist, being obsessed with space and motivated to find out what happened to a prior crew who disappeared into space twenty years prior to the book’s events. Her curiosity ends up getting herself and her crew into trouble she did not anticipate. However, I enjoyed getting to know the psychological reasoning behind her obsession, with her using it to cope and escape from the apocalyptic state of the world.
Billie is also interesting, in that she’s a hologram of the captain of that other ship that disappeared. Despite having been away for so long, I love how she’s still very much a realist, helping Cleo “come back to Earth,” so to speak, while Cleo helps Billie to loosen up and not take things so seriously. While some of their romance felt a tad instalove-y, they had some very cute moments together, and I rooted for them to work out.
The book balanced the central romance and the sci-fi elements fairly well, including the mystery around the missing crew. Initial subjective prose issues aside, this was a fast-paced, yet simultaneously cozy read, which kept me invested in all the plot threads throughout, with it all coming together in a satisfying way at the end.
I had a lot of fun with this book, and would recommend this to readers looking for a fairly lighthearted sapphic sci-fi romance.

In The Stars Too Fondly, Cleo McQueary and her three best friends accidentally hijack a spaceship from a failed, decades-old interplanetary exploration program and find themselves stuck on a flight to another galaxy with only the conscious hologram of the ship's captain to guide them.

When I saw this book was billed as "part space odyssey, part sapphic rom-com", I was more than a little excited. Those are basically my two favorite genres. I was equal parts intrigued and entertained by the space odyssey half of the story. The science was interesting and I was drawn in by the mystery. I appreciated the multi-media bits of narration, including chat logs and news articles. The characters are well developed and fun to read about.

Unfortunately, I found the rom-com half of the story wildly unsuccessful. Cleo and Billie's relationship is criminally underdeveloped and built of too many "tell" rather than "show" moments. The humor feels forced and bogs down the plot, giving the narration an inauthentic and irreverent tone (in a bad way). The characters are around 27-30, but they all read like they're 19, which does not help the narrative voice. Both POVs are weak and lean too heavily on the suspense and mystery to remain engaging. I think this book could have much more successful had it not tried so hard to be funny.

The Stars Too Fondly was quite an entertaining space adventure with a wonderful cast of characters! I mostly loved this one, save a couple things I didn't, so I think it best to break it down!

What I Loved:

►The premise was amazing. I was so excited about the premise, and it absolutely delivered. I mean, a whole ship of people just... vanish? And now the world is on its last legs, and then oops some randos accidentally steal the ship?! It is just such a great mix of high stakes and absurdity that I loved it.

►Speaking of high stakes mixed with absurdity, the balance of emotions was great. I mean- obviously there are going to be some harrowing moments, right? And there were. Intense, scary, sad, you name it. But they were interspersed with so many great funny and heartwarming moments that it was incredibly readable.

►As I said, I loved the characters. Cleo and her friends just had such a great rapport together. You could tell that they cared deeply for one another, but also were not afraid to call each other out when needed.

►There are so many mysteries to figure out! I loved the mystery element. There are secrets raging in the past and the present that the gang is going to have to figure out if they have any hope of getting home one day, and I loved reading about them all. It kept me guessing, and I could not put the book down because of them.

What I Struggled With:

►The romance. Sure, it's a little... unusual that Cleo and the AI have some feelings, but that isn't what bugged me. It was that they seemed to go from "moderate crush" to full-blown "I love this person more than anything in any universe" without a ton of development. It was just... not even too fast, just too understated? Like I legit wondered if I missed something, because to go from butterflies to love that quickly didn't add up.

►The ending was a little too easy/neat. It did end in a way that wrapped things up, so don't worry about that! It just seemed a little too easy for me after the entirety of the book not being easy, if that makes sense?

Bottom Line: Amazing premise and great characters, this was definitely an overall win!

I knew within the first few chapters that The Stars Too Fondly was going to be a five star read. By the end of the book I knew it was going to be a book I needed on my shelf, a book I was going to scream about, and is 100% going to be on my top ten list at the end of the year. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year, and as of the-book-before-this-one, I’ve read 315 books so far this year.

There’s a line in the blurb: “So, here’s the thing: Cleo and her friends really, truly didn’t mean to steal this spaceship.”

SAY LESS. PLEASE.

Sapphic space adventure rom-com with a strong found family component, a swoony star-crossed love story, and a diverse cast? Are you kidding me right now with some of my all-time favorites vibes all vibing in the same book?

Debut author Emily Hamilton seriously sat down and wrote a book that does what few books do to me more and more: Make me long for extra stars, because if I could rate this book six stars I totally would.

The book pulls you in from the start, with Hamilton’s ragtag group of queer twenty-somethings who just want to peek inside an abandoned spaceship and see what they can glean about the mystery of what happened to the entire crew, who disappeared with a flash of light on launch day. You know what they say: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. They messed around and now they get to find out why it may not be such a good idea to go poking around in strange, abandoned spaceships. Or maybe it’s the stars aligning just right and this was meant to happen.

The story is engaging, propulsive, emotional, romantic, poetic, and so well-crafted I wish I could shake Emily Hamilton’s hand and thank her in person. I cried more than once and I couldn’t tell you how much I love these characters. I just vibed with this book on every level. Can’t recommend it enough.

I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.

File Under: 5 Star Review/Found Family/Lesbian Romance/LGBTQ Fiction/LGBTQ Romance/Science Fiction

Emily Hamilton’s "The Stars Too Fondly" is an intriguing space adventure with a premise that hooks you from the start. Cleo and her friends didn’t mean to steal a spaceship; they just wanted to uncover the mystery behind the Providence crew’s disappearance twenty years ago. However, their curiosity lands them on an unexpected journey to Proxima Centauri, with no way to turn back and a hologram of the missing captain, Billie, offering snide commentary along the way.

Cleo, who has always dreamt of being an astronaut, finds herself in a bittersweet situation. Earth is a lost cause, so perhaps this accidental voyage is a blessing in disguise. But as they travel deeper into space, the laws of physics start to warp, old mysteries resurface, and Cleo’s initially combative relationship with Billie evolves into something deeper and more desperate.

The book excels in its representation and the found family dynamic among Cleo and her friends. The diverse cast and their interactions provide warmth and relatability amidst the cold vastness of space. The mystery of the Providence crew and the strange occurrences aboard the ship add an engaging layer of suspense to the narrative.

However, the juvenile behavior of the main character, Cleo, often detracts from the story. Her impulsiveness and lack of maturity can be frustrating, especially when the stakes are so high. Additionally, the romance between Cleo and Billie feels less than compelling. While their relationship is meant to develop into something profound, it often comes across as forced and lacking the emotional depth needed to be truly convincing.

Despite these drawbacks, "The Stars Too Fondly" offers a light-hearted exploration of space and its mysteries. Fans of space adventures and found family narratives might still find enjoyment in this tale, even if the central romance and character dynamics leave something to be desired.

What kept this really going for me were the characters, I fell in love with them. The author also did well at describing the passage of time. This was an interesting and overall sweet story that was a pleasant experience.

Note: ARC provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I didn't connect with this title at all. I found the tone off-putting, the characters felt one-dimensional and I didn't care about any of them, the plot wasn't engaging, the romance fell flat, and the actual "science" of this sci-fi was lacking. The only real positive for me was that I liked the queer cast. Perhaps this was just a case of me not understanding the premise going in, but I was expecting something totally different.

Probably the biggest example of this for me is the characters, who are supposed to be adults but act more like teenagers. Their attitudes and conversations just felt totally off for what is supposed to be an adult novel. Maybe I would have been more on board if this had been a YA. Also, this is perhaps a bit nit-picky, but multiple times Clea is referred to as a "girl." Isn't she supposed to be in her late-twenties? Surely she's a woman, not a girl! Not only did their ages feel off, but Hamilton couldn't make me care about any of them. Their conversations never felt natural or believable (especially their arguments, which were stupid and usually resolved two seconds later).

Something else that I think contributed to the tone feeling off for me was all the pop culture references from today (or even references that are already outdated today) in a book set in the future. Every time it was jarring, and it didn't seem to serve the narrative at all. The one exception I would say is when Cleo and Billie watched While You Were Sleeping, because at least we got to see some character work done with it (something that was missing from most of the book).

Perhaps the core problem for me, was that I just didn't believe anything this book was trying to tell me. I don't believe that after accidentally going to space on a ship where the previous crew mysteriously vanished that anyone would reasonably be doing anything but spending every waking moment trying to find a way to divert the ship back home. I don't believe there's a magic machine that can make any food they want like a 3D printer. I don't believe anything regarding the science of The Other Place. I don't believe that after getting super powers, a hologram with no previous experience with super powers could train you in how to use them, especially when for some reason you all get individualized super powers and not just the same across the board. I don't believe that anyone would be stupid enough to try to die for a hologram, when we already know the real-life version of the hologram is trapped in another dimension and you are the key to saving her (and everyone else).

I feel like I had so many problems with this book, but I'll just leave it there. This wasn't for me, and I don't recommend it.

The Stars Too Fondly by Emily Hamilton is described as “part space odyssey, part sapphic rom-com,” which it definitely delivers on. And doesn’t that just sound awesome?

Unfortunately, while I loved the potential of this book, the actual execution fell a little short. It felt like there was a lot of telling rather than showing, which worked at the beginning to set the tone. But as the story progressed, this made me struggle to stay connected to the characters. The romance between Cleo and Billie had such great promise of being this tender, earnest thing but wound up feeling sort of convenient.

Despite this, I did really like the characters. Cleo’s found family had a cute dynamic, and Billie was a great addition to their group. The witty banter between everyone was a lot of fun and I liked all their individual voices.

Overall, I think I went into this novel with too high expectations. I wanted to love it so badly. And while it didn’t click with me as much as I wanted it to, The Stars Too Fondly is still at its heart a cute, light sci-fi/fantasy romance.

Thank you to the publisher, HarperCollins Canada, and NetGalley for providing me an e-ARC of this book. All thoughts are my own.

This book has space travel, discussion of a fourth dimension, dark matter propulsion engines, and some even more far out stuff that would be spoilers for the plot, and yet what I struggled to wrap my brain around the most was the fact that, in a group of people largely born in the late 2030s and growing up in the 2040s/2050s, why was everyone so obsessed with movies and television from 1996?? Absolutely encyclopedic knowledge of star trek voyager from every character, a show that would have been 65 years old at the time of the events of the book. Why are they watching While You Were Sleeping?!

I tried really hard to just let that go and focus on the plot but it did bother me a lot. I enjoyed the central love story, metaphysical love triangle and all, though I felt like all of the time jumps and different consciousnesses and log entries took away some of the emotional momentum of it. It just felt like this book had so much going on and none of it was really developed deeply or really thought through. I could see this being for fans of Becky Chamber’s wayfarer series, if you don’t think about the details too much.

And there it was, looming over them like a skyscraper, steepled black against the starry sky: Providence I.

Twenty years ago, a crew was assembled and placed on a ship that had the newly harnessed black matter engine that only the chief engineer, Halvorsen, seemed to understand and was set to take off for an exoplanet that could sustain life. Horrifyingly, the world watched as their hope for an escape from an increasingly weather destabilizing Earth, was poofed out of existence, literally. As Halvorsen did the countdown and got to one, the crew and passengers disappeared. Halvorsen went into hiding and one year later disappeared. Now, in 2061, Cleo and her friends, Kaleisha, Abe, and Ros, execute their “Space Heist” plan and break into the facility that houses the spaceship Providence I. Only, as they search for clues to what happened, the heist is on them and the spaceship's dark matter energy fires up and they're suddenly on the way to the exoplanet. With the help of a hologram, courtesy of the ship's original Captain, Billie, who uploaded her brain into the ship's computer, Cleo and her friends will work to discover the truth of what really happened, traverse space and time, and fight for progress with love.

And four of them decided, idiotically, that if no one else was going to solve the mystery of Launch Day, they were going to do it themselves.

The Stars Too Fondly was a scifi story that was told almost exclusively through dialogue, leaving character development feeling not as there to me, thus bereft that I knew these characters. The first half is told a lot from Cleo's point-of-view, as she talks to her friends, readers learn a little about the world in 2061, how Earth is heading more and more towards desolate. There were also archived documents from communications between the captain and the chief engineer, with newspaper stories to create kind of flashbacks to let the reader on what happened in the past in between the chapters; while informative, I did think it hurt some of the flow for me. One thing that didn't quite make sense to me, the horror of not understanding what happened with the Providence I launch, is said to keep anyone from wanting to try such a thing again but the excitement of building it was also said to have inspired the new generation to all become STEM graduates? It's alluded that the companies are scared, so they see no profit but all these STEM graduates haven't inspired or gained scientific knowledge to build up a space program again, when it seems direly needed? I also struggled mightily with the vibe of this, the first problem, the characters were all late twenties but this definitely has a Young Adult feeling to it and the second, vernacular doesn't seem to have changed at all in the future. I don't know if this is a futuristic version of The Tiffany Problem, but “dude, slow your roll”, “pray tell”, and “It helped, she quickly learned, to think of the passing days aboard Providence I like a montage in an eighties movie— a training montage, a getting-the-team-together montage, a “dancing and sock-sliding through the empty rooms” montage.”, said by a twenty-seven year old in 2061 doesn't trip you up and take you out of what is a scific story, like it did me, then you'd probably enjoy this more than I did.

“My friends call me Billie.” The hologram blinked at her.

Once the ship takes off, you get some of Cleo excited to be on the space adventure and Kaleisha angry, because she had a good life on Earth and didn't want to leave. Abe and Ros are around but, for the most part, aren't focused on for too much of the story in the first half. The second half gets more scifi and we get more of it told from Billie's pov, I wasn't a STEM student, so the science parts sounded somewhat believable for a scifi fiction story, but I have no idea if they'd pass a sniff test to others in the know. The second half answers some questions with Halverson accessing powers from a different dimension, that he was warned away from and the consequences of his ignoring. Cleo and her friends get powers from the dark matter engine and those powers help them immediately, Cleo and Kaleisha suddenly can get the ship to jump in distance so the original seven years to get to the exoplanet, will only take a few months, handy. Cleo can also see into the past and future, with Ros getting some of that future ability too. It gets a little hard to follow in that way scifi can, but it becomes clear that Cleo and her friends are working with what gave the warnings against Halverson, whose disappearance gets answered, along with what happened to the passengers of the ship.

But anyone with half a brain— like, say, tiny lesbians with mommy issues and a fear of commitment, or starship captains who have lost everything— knows that love can hurt too.

The romance aspect wasn't filled out or developed enough for me and it's going to hinge on if you think a programmed hologram representing an uploaded brain can be sentient. Cleo and hologram Billie are snarky with each other and then a little into the second half, I guess that snark was love, not sure I can say I felt it. It becomes even more your mileage will vary when Cleo finds out what happened to the passengers and her and her friends fight to rescue them, bringing the “real” Billie into the picture. The ending gives us a battle (with an extremely found quick answer for defeating), a sex scene that felt forced in, and an abrupt back home. This explored different dimensions, profit and progress, and what constitutes love and it's power, but I think it got lost on its way more than landed.

This is a fun dare I say it cozy sci-fi that follows a group of friends that accidentally steals a spaceship and ends up on a trip 20 years in the making. I loved the characters Cleo and Billy are definite favorites.

The plot and characters kept me invested from page one, and there are a couple of twists and reveals that were very surprising and had me loving the story even more. I loved that our group of friends got some superpowers and they had to figure out how to use them. I loved Billy she is snarky and loves Romcoms which they watch some of my favorites on the ship.

While Billy and Cleo's relationship seems impossible since Billy is a hologram, I still loved watching them grow closer and fall in love. This is a fun space adventure filled with friendships, romance, and saving... well I don't want to give it away. I had a lot of fun reading this and will definitely check out whatever this author writes next.

I wanted to like this one a lot more but it was just okay for me. Unfortunately I didn’t really connect to the characters much which is usually what I need to get through a story.

I loved this! Gimme all the gay space operas you can. It’s not every day you find a well rounded queer group of adults accidentally stealing a space ship and stumbling upon magic powers, but Hamilton’s debut pulled this off perfectly. The representation was sublime, nothing felt showy or forced, it just was what it was. The space travel, training montages and flashbacks were all done well that kept the reader entertained while our cast had to get from point A to B. The overall message of mankind ruining our planet and taking more and more without thought of others really hits home, as well as the importance of found family and how strong love can be. I found the metaphor of falling in love with a hologram cute and poignant as far as it not mattering what someone is to love them, I just felt the like to love jump happened kind of quickly and wanted more feelings before the “I love yous.” Other than that critique I have no notes!

Vibes:
Queer
Space opera
Mystery
Training montages
Found family
Special powers
Good friendships
Mature conversation
Science and humanity

The best way I can describe this book is Heartstopper in space.

The Stars Too Fondly is listed as a sapphic rom-com and cozy sci-fi, but I really don't think that description gives any clue as to the depth and weight conveyed within the story. I really didn't find it to be too much of a "rom-com" (I don't like rom-coms typically, so this worked in my favor), and while I see where the "cozy" sci-fi comes from, there is a LOT more going on than what I would expect from something labeled as "cozy."
Told through a handful of mediums (traditional prose, secret internal monologues, archived conversations, etc), this book details the story of a friend group of queer young scientists as they navigate the stars in search of a spaceship crew that disappeared nearly 19 years ago. The pacing is a bit slow at times, which is why I think this counts as "cozy" (most of the story takes place in one setting). That being said, there is a fair amount of angst, which I enjoyed greatly, and the ending was much more meaningful than I think any true rom-com could've managed. I did find some of the plot twists to be predictable, but that wasn't a huge deal. I also want to note that some "sci-fi" elements read more as "science fantasy," which I saw as a main complaint in other reviews and while I didn't mind it, I do think it's important for people to understand this isn't the most scientific of sci-fis.
This book really emphasizes found family vibes, too. While I struggled a bit to connect to the main character, Cleo, and her romance with Billie (the ship's holographic captain), I was rooting for them by the end. Kal and Abe reminded me a lot of Elle and Tao from Heartstopper, but I thought they were neat as side characters. Ros was my favorite, mostly because they were mysterious, angsty, and done with everyone else's crap. I thought the villain was pretty well done in making the reader dislike them, but I do think they were "defeated" pretty easily.
The Stars Too Fondly is a sapphic sci-fi novel about a found family of queer scientists that balances cozy vibes with themes of the dangers of progress.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the free e-ARC!

3.5/5