Black Star by Eric Glover

Illustrated by Arielle Jovellands
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Two astronauts fight against a harsh environment and each other after their ship collided with an asteroid and crashed on the planet’s surface. Harper North, the lead scientist, and the team’s survival expert are the only survivors. The ship’s emergency shuttle crashes around 100 kilometers away, so it’s a race against each other and the deadly summer sun and acid rains to see who can get to the one-person shuttle first. The team came to this deadly planet in search of a special flower with properties that can help an unknown sickness on Earth, but the tragedy of the crash and loss of the rest of the crew bring out the worst in North and her surviving shipmate.

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This story really needed some more set up. Why do we need this flower? There were some key pieces of information revealed in the book’s summary that weren’t all on the pages in the story. The crash is also extremely abrupt. Within a page, we go from cryo sleep to crash landed, and we learn more about How North got out of the wreckage through “flashbacks” that are incomplete - North continues to replay certain key events through her visor, which apparently records everything she sees. There was a lot of leaps at the very beginning that could have had more panels of illustration to explain everything. Despite the rocky start, the survival portion and race to the shuttle was very intense and not predictable. If the amount of detail was spent in the beginning to set up everything, this would be a fantastic story.

​This story has some intense moments with some fairly violent scuffles but isn’t bloody or gory. There is some language.
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Sara’s Rating: 6/10
Suitability Level: Grades 9-12

This review was made possible with an advanced reader copy from the publisher through Net Galley.

Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Publication Date: May 11, 2021
ISBN: 9781419742286 (Hardcover)

Tags: Rating: 6/10, Suitability: High School, Graphic Fiction, Science Fiction, Survival, CSLA 2021