Romance will always be my go-to, but sometimes it’s nice to take a break from romantic love to enjoy a good friendship story. And as friendship stories go, The Stardust Grail is top calibre. This novel about best friends on a high-stakes treasure hunt will push you to joyous highs and heart wrenching lows that rival the emotional crescendos you’ll get from any romance.
After years of helping an alien friend with dangerous and illegal pursuits, art thief Maya has given up the adventurous life to return to grad school on earth. But as an infected colonist, she’s having trouble fitting in, and as a long-time traveller not used to taking root, she struggles to find purpose in the earth-rooted academic lifestyle. She’s on the verge of failing out of school. And she’s not sure she cares.
Then the nodes that connect earth to other systems start disappearing, and the government is begging Maya to carry out one final heist to save humanity–steal the Stardust Grail, the lost artifact capable of creating new nodes. The government reveals intriguing newfound evidence–long lost journals of a famed space explorer that may prove to be coded treasure maps to the location of the Grail.
The only problem? The Grail turns out to be the same object Maya and her best friend Uncle, a tentacled member of the Frenro species, have already pursued unsuccessfully for years. It’s the missing fertility object capable of allowing the nearly-extinct Frenro species to repopulate.
If Maya can use the newly unearthed clues to find the Grail, she’ll have to decide between saving the Frenro and saving humanity.
As Maya and Uncle pull together an unlikely crew and race to find the object before government agents get their hands on it, a space-faring treasure hunt ensues. But all the time, Maya is contemplating what it will mean to betray humanity for the sake of her friend. Or to betray her friend for the sake of humanity.
The story is not fast-paced, but it kept my interest as the characters met intriguing new cultures and creatures. The bulk of the page count turned out to be more of an Indiana Jones style treasure hunt than the heist the blurb promised, but I was OK with that, because the space exploration and cultural elements were so strong.
Strongest and most attention-keeping of all, though, were the relationships that developed along the way between Maya and an intriguing and diverse array of secondary characters. From Maya’s reluctant alliance with a warrior from the opposing side to her growing understanding of her once-haughty professor, Maya’s view of the universe expands through relationships that each explore a different aspect of the multifaceted concept of friendship.
And the crux of the whole story is Maya’s relationship with her alien best friend, Uncle. The love between these two is clear and heartwarming from the get-go. But as complications arise, Maya begins to question how well she can truly know a person who belongs to an entirely different species. One with a very un-human way of seeing. She’s forced to explore the horrifying possibility that, from a human perspective, her dearest friend may actually be the enemy, and she must ask herself how far she’s willing to trust a friend whose motives and thinking she can never truly understand.
Even though this story was slower-paced than my usual reads and didn’t contain my usual go-to romance plot, I enjoyed The Stardust Grail from start to finish. I adored the alien cultures, high stakes, and deep friendships that developed. If you’re as much a sucker for found-family spaceship crews as I am, this one is for you!
