Review: The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley

Summary

Somewhere on the outer rim of the universe, a mass of decaying world-ships known as the Legion is traveling in the seams between the stars. For generations, a war for control of the Legion has been waged, with no clear resolution. As worlds continue to die, a desperate plan is put into motion.

Zan wakes with no memory, prisoner of a people who say they are her family. She is told she is their salvation – the only person capable of boarding the Mokshi, a world-ship with the power to leave the Legion. But Zan’s new family is not the only one desperate to gain control of the prized ship. Zan finds that she must choose sides in a genocidal campaign that will take her from the edges of the Legion’s gravity well to the very belly of the world.

Zan will soon learn that she carries the seeds of the Legion’s destruction – and its possible salvation. But can she and her ragtag band of followers survive the horrors of the Legion and its people long enough to deliver it?

My thoughts

The Stars Are Legion was my first book by Kameron Hurley and it definitely won’t be the last. Quite the opposite, I now want to devour every single book of hers, preferably all at once.

This book is like nothing I’ve read before and I had a lot of fun reading something as unique as this. The Stars Are Legion might as well be titled Lesbians in Space and even that doesn’t cover how truly epic it is: men don’t exist in this world (don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against men in books but it’s SO DAMN refreshing to have an all female cast). And if you wonder how this could be possible, they need to have babies after all, let me tell you, you are in for a ride. Pregnancy without men is just one of many reasons why this book deserves the gold metal of WEIRD (and I mean that in the best possible way. 100% my kind of weird).

That’s not all that makes this a great book though (but let’s be real, that alone would make it a damn good book). THERE IS MORE. One of my favorite things in books is having an unreliable narrator and tha’ts what you get. At first it might seem like it’s taking the usual, often-read memory loss route, but The Stars Are Legion takes this scenario and turns it into something… more. The main character doesn’t just suffer from memory loss but people around her purposefully keep secrets from her. Secrets are being kept for good reasons which makes the whole situation very addictive instead of annoying like it often is in other cases. It also helps to have more than one POV character and hints that give the reader ideas of what’s going on.
On top of that it made for a good way to introduce the world building. It seems like a hard balancing act to explain the world while at the same time keeping many details from the main character. On me it had the effect that it was easier to get behind the world building (which seemed quite complex and as I said before, WEIRD), and it also kept me hooked and unable to stop reading because I wanted to know more and find out what’s going on.

As for the characters: from what I’ve heard Hurley keeps true to her signature and created once again a cast of characters which many would probably label unlikeable. I absolutely loved how cruel and monstrous all these ladies are and how you can trust absolutely no one.
I got to admit that this meant it took me quite same time to start really caring about the characters, but once I did, I HAD FEELS. By the last third of the book I was so attached to some of the characters that I know I would rate this book even higher on rereading.

Kameron Hurley’s The Stars Are Legion is a space opera like never seen before, putting weird on a whole new level, and featuring a fantastic cast of brutal, amazing women.