Alexa Donne

Princess Leonie Kolburg, aged nineteen and heir to a faded European spaceship, enters the engagement season hoping only to save her family from financial ruin, but is soon falling for her first, rejected love.

The Stars We Steal

Tanishi Sharda

Elliot let out a bitter laugh. “That wasn’t her leverage. Not really. It was you, Leo. She threatened to turn you out. Charge you exorbitant docking fees and ruin your reputation among the other ships, ensure that you were left destitute. She knew I would agree to anything to protect you.”

“Draped over the boxes of contraband, the side of the room clearly denoted for Elliot’s black-market finds, were my mother’s dresses. Her heirloom ball gowns that I had been saving. Her wedding dress.

Elliot followed my gaze, and I saw him blanch. Then he sputtered, but my rage was fast as a bullet, cutting off his excuses.”

“What’s the use of being wealthy if the money is dirty, El?” ”

“Do you have to tell me now?” I wanted him to wait. Break my heart any other time. Let today be perfect.”

I would never love anyone but Elliot, I’d realized. Any iteration of him was one I would love to the edges of the universe.

And it was like all the air had been sucked out of the room.

Yep, I was totally fine. With the way Elliot allowed himself to be led away, with how he’d utterly failed to read the disappointment on my face. He used to be so good at reading me, and now . . .

Here I was, forced to watch Elliot flirt with yet another girl, right in front of me. Dance with someone else, hold her the way he used to hold me, in this very place. Every second was torture.

My lips tingled from phantom kisses, burned with memories and regrets. I needed to stop thinking about it, about him.

Looking good was the best revenge. Hope he enjoyed courting my sister right in front of me.

“What are we doing, Elliot? A few days ago you wanted me to suffer, and now that I am, you’re concerned.”

What had hurt more than my sister’s carelessness was Elliot’s reaction. He’d had none. We’d gone from open aggression to just . . . nothing. I might as well be a stranger.

“Why did you even come up here? You don’t care about me. You were just spoiling for a fight.”

“Maybe I want to see you suffer a bit.”

We would spar, and I would learn to hate him, too.

I wasn’t prepared for the sheer force of Elliot’s hatred toward me. It knocked me off-center, hollowed me out. And now I’d have to see him nearly every day for a month, while he flirted with other girls, no less.

It was the boy whose heart I'd broken and for whom my heart still fluttered.

Nessa Luna

+1 for the mention of the word asexual. (view spoiler)[Shame it was a character that wasn't really there for the majority of the book. (hide spoiler)]

Hope Gamble

There were quiet a few instances of second-hand embarrassment. 😳 The ending felt a little rushed.

Julie Janis

This story was okay. I couldn't really get into it or care for any of the characters. It was disappointing because I really enjoyed Brightly Burning. The Jane Austen similarities were nice to find, but I couldn't find any Bachelor/Bachelorette similarities which was really disappointing. The mention of people drinking and getting drunk a ton got annoying too. But despite all that, the idea of an event to date several people, find eligible matches, and get engaged at the end all in space was pretty cool.

Isabelle Reads

This book is not a brilliant work of classic literature. It’s not a richly gorgeous high fantasy. This is not a romance that shatters hearts the world over. This isn’t even a bleak dystopian that shows a future both beautiful and terrifying. 

This book is a 100% certified guilty pleasure read. 

and SCREW IT ALL but I actually really enjoyed it.

Let us begin with Ye Olde Synopsis.

It’s been one hundred and seventy years since Earth became uninhabitable. One hundred and seventy years since the last remnants of Earth’s population fled the planet on a small fleet of spaceships, beginning a dazzling new life among the stars. 
Since living in space requires a completely new lifestyle society, the survivors built new ways of life to accommodate. Those less fortunate are crammed into the smallest, most dilapidated ships, deprived of the luxuries the richer ships enjoy. The largest spaceships are named after the glories of the old Earth: the Versailles, the Lady Liberty, the Empire, the Shanghai, the Saint Petersburg, the Scandinavian, etc, and can host hundreds of the fleet’s wealthiest inhabitants. Smaller, private ships, like the Islay and the Prinzessin Sofi, are owned and operated by a few select families. 
In a world where the human population is a fraction of its size on Earth, making a strategic, early match is everything. That’s why the Valg Season exists: a Bachelor-esque whirlwind of events designed to throw the most eligible children at each other’s heads. At the end of approximately five weeks, engagements are announced, and the future population of the spacebound colony is assured. However, the Season only happens every five years, so connections must be made and engagements secured with the utmost speed.

Leonie Kolburg’s family is on the cusp of both worlds; their rapid decline in fortunes forcing them to rent out their small private ship and live on the monetary goodwill of their rich cousins on the Scandinavian. Leonie’s father and younger sister insist on living lavishly, mindless of how much the family is dependent on their rich relations. The only reason her family isn’t bankrupt already is because of Leo’s frugal financial management.

But this year, the Valg season is returning, and considering this is Leonie’s last eligible season, her father is constantly pressuring her to make a wealthy match and save the family’s fortunes. But since making that match would require her to forget Elliot Wentworth, Leo isn’t exactly too eager to get engaged. Elliot was the servant boy who she fell desperately in love with three years prior. She was engaged to him for several hours, before her overbearing aunt and father bullied her into breaking off the “deeply improper” match. 
Put another way, he was too poor for her.

Leo believes she will never see Elliot Wentworth again, until a now rich and titled Elliot shows up during the Valg’s opening ball, and Leo realizes she’ll have to watch him fall in love with someone else right in front of her eyes.


YES FINALLY I GET TO DISCUSS MY OWN THOUGHTS do y’all know how long that summary took me to write

*laughs while sobbing very slightly*

Firstly and foremostly: the plot.
The plot felt like the craziest mashup of the Bachelor, speed dating, regency traditions, black market space trading, and class divisions.
Literally that was the plot.
and NO ONE tell me that that Bachelor action wasn’t half the novel there is literally a gold rose on the cover.

For being a story set in future dystopian space, I didn’t really feel like the cool scifi part of the book was that great or even all that relevant. You know how there’s books in scifi settings that actually use plot points related to holograms or netscreens to move everything forward? 
Yeah this was not that. 
This was more a dramatic rich person romance that happened to be set in space. I didn’t care that it wasn’t really true scifi, but just don’t go into this thinking you’ll get cutting edge scifi action and you’ll be fine.

Speaking of the romance, I want to mention that this story is billed as a retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Now, to those non-Austen superfans among you, this is no cause for concern. The similarities are really not that obvious, and you definitely don’t need to have ever even touched a copy of Persuasion to enjoy the story. 

LE CHARACTERSSS

Overall, the characters were nothing special. 

WAIT NO I TAKE THAT BACK EXCEPT FOR EVGENIA. HAH THAT GIRL WAS ABSOLUTELY HILARIOUS. 
57% of my enjoyment of this novel came from Evgenia being sarcastic, Evgenia playing matchmaker, Evgenia tossing people into pools, the NUMBER OF TIMES THIS GIRL MADE ME CACKLE Y’ALL YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE.

Anyways. Everyone except Evgenia was kinda bland and complained about rich people problems, which just got kinda annoying after 200 pages or so.

Leo, our intrepid heroine, was enjoyable for the most part, but she gave off a few vibes of rich-person-trying-to-help-poor-people-but-does-a-horrible-job-because-she’s-too-speshul-to-know-what-true-suffering-is. Also, her complaint that she knows pain because she has to manage her family’s finances? 
girl, I do that every time I walk into Barnes & Noble. Be quiet. 

But besides the occasional whine, Leo really just wasn’t that bad.

Now, Elliot though. 
Elliot definitely wasn’t as amazing as I’d hoped he’d be. While the original character he was based on, Captain Wentworth (no, the name was definitely not changed *rolls eyes dramatically*) was literally my book boyfriend when I first read Persuasion, his modern counterpart here was just meh. Elliot acted like a jerk, he was unnecessarily passive aggressive, and I had so much trouble seeing real romantic connection with Leo.

Speaking of which, that’s another thing: the romance between Elliot and Leo was pretty much just TOLD to me. Leo told me soooo maaaaanyyyy tiiiiimeees she and Elliot are madly in love and they are just so sImiLAr.
Let us look at a brief example. Elliot said something to the effect of: “Oh, we both love having our first dates reading on a cramped loveseat in the middle of winter!”
Leo then thinks, “Gasp, we’re clearly soulmates!!” 

…

honey, do you even know how much that doesn’t work in real life?

sooooo i’ve kinda just dissed these characters for the last three paragraphs, but in reality, the drama and the eccentricities of the plot more than made up for the most annoying parts. 
That’s why I said this was a total guilty pleasure read. No one watches the Bachelor because it’s deep, high-quality entertainment. 
But do they watch it anyways?
100% YES.



Ratings: 
Star Rating: ★★★☆☆
If This Book Was a Movie Rating: PG

Recommendations If You Liked This Book:
The Selection by Kiera Cass
Cinder by Marissa Meyer

Joan 

Between this and For Darkness Shows the Stars I'm kind of convinced that Persuasion just can't be adapted into a YA scifi and be great. Persuasion is such a thoughtful mature novel that trying to add in scifi stakes with teenage protagonists just doesn't work well for me. It was a generally enjoyable story that hit the major beats from Persuasion, but I can't really call it a good Persuasion retelling. Not to mention this is yet another book that robbed me of the aspec marriage of convenience that I desperately want. I knew it waa gonna happen but I was still disappointed.

Alice

Lucy

4.5

Beautiful characters. Not much world building but a great romance set in space

Celia Adams

3.5 Stars

Another awesome retelling. Donne has come up with one of the most interesting settings in which to come up with new ways of using classic novels and I am Here. For. It.

Aubrey Erskine

For the full review visit my blog:
 https://shelflifechronicles.com/2020/...

The Stars We Steal was the cute, fluffy and futuristic romance I needed in my life. A retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion in space with some nods to The Bachelor. It was a decent mix mix of politics and romance with a dash of sci-fi to make it that much better.

Manon van Heumen

This book was such a good surprise, I absolutely loved it!

The Bachelorette goes to space in this gripping story about a young girl caught in a world of royal intrigue and lost love in her quest to save her family from ruin. Perfect for fans of Katharine McGee, Melissa de la Cruz, and Kiera Cass. Engagement season is in the air. Eighteen-year-old Princess Leonie “Leo” Kolburg, heir to a faded European spaceship, has only one thing on her mind: which lucky bachelor can save her family from financial ruin? But when Leo’s childhood friend and first love, Elliot, returns as the captain of a successful whiskey ship, everything changes. Elliot was the one who got away, the boy Leo’s family deemed to be unsuitable for marriage. Now he’s the biggest catch of the season and he seems determined to make Leo’s life miserable. But old habits die hard, and as Leo navigates the glittering balls of the Valg Season, she finds herself falling for her first love in a game of love, lies, and past regrets. Fans of Katharine McGee and Kiera Cass will be dazzled by this world of lost love and royal intrigue.

The Stars We Steal

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