She’s a revolutionary. Humanity is running out of options. Habitable planets are being destroyed as quickly as they’re found and Naira Sharp knows the reason why. The all-powerful Mercator family has been controlling the exploration of the universe for decades, and exploiting any materials they find along the way under the guise of helping humanity’s expansion. But Naira knows the truth, and she plans to bring the whole family down from the inside.

He’s the heir to the dynasty. Tarquin Mercator never wanted to run a galaxy-spanning business empire. He just wanted to study rocks and read books. But Tarquin’s father has tasked him with monitoring the mining of a new planet, and he doesn’t really have a choice in the matter.

Disguised as Tarquin’s new bodyguard, Naira plans to destroy his ship before it lands. But neither of them expects to end up stranded on a dead planet. To survive and keep her secret, Naira will have to join forces with the man she’s sworn to hate. And together they will uncover a plot that’s bigger than both of them.

IN A NUTSHELL
Wow! This was intense. There was so much in this novel: vivid, textured world-building, big themes related to contagion, betrayal and the abuse of power, a tense, twisty, action-packed plot, some original and powerful ideas on enhancing humans through bio-engineering and memory mapping, and an enemies-to-lovers thread that avoided all the cliches and became gut-wrenchingly painful and surprising rather than predictably romantic. 

Megan E. O’Keefe is a new author for me. I bought ’The Blighted Stars’ because I wanted to make this summer a Sci Fi Summer, and it’s the first book in a Space Opera series. It got great reviews, and I liked the premise that the publisher laid out. 

I hesitated over buying the book when I saw what seemed to be an enemies-to-lovers trope. Romantasy doesn’t appeal to me. I didn’t want to spend 512 pages on romantic angst. 

I was excited to find that in ‘The Blighted Stars’ Megan O’Keefe has delivered a deeply imagined universe and an action-packed plot powered a struggle against a world-killing contagion, led by ruthless powerful people and spiced with conflicts of loyalty, betrayals, the abuse of power and internecine conflicts. The plot goes beyond typical Space Opera struggles between power blocks by introducing original ideas on enhancing human capabilities through bioengineering and memory mapping. I liked that these concepts reached beyond a fascination with the technology and raised questions about the impact of the technology on identity and the fundamental nature of being human. 

There was a form of enemies-to-lovers trope, adding an emotional charge to the story, but it wasn’t at all what I was expecting. There was nothing romantic about it. There was tension, pain, misunderstanding, even grief, but no comforting escape into romantic love. I loved that Megan O’Keefe used the relationship between the two main characters to keep the story human rather than making them into chess pieces in a war of ideas. Their struggle to understand and trust one another was a great way of showing both perspectives – the governing power versus the burn-it-all-down rebels, while increasing the impact of the risks they took and the sacrifices they made. 

Best of all, ‘The Blighted Stars’ was an exciting book that made me care about the people on both sides and kept me hoping for better outcomes. 

I’m very glad that Megan O’Keefe wrote the books in The Devoured Worlds trilogy back-to-back because now I don’t have to wait to find out what happens next. I’ve already downloaded ‘The Fractured Dark’.

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