Review: Star Splitter

Star Splitter by Matthew J. Kirby
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

2.5 stars 

I received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. 

“What happened to you?” I whispered. 

Six years ago, Jessica's scientist parents left to do research in space and now they are making the decision to have her join them. Seventeen years old, Jessica doesn't want to leave her life, she's happy with her grandparents and trying to work up the courage to tell her friend Avery she cares for her more than a friend. Teleportation will have Jessica's body getting printed fourteen light years away on a ship where she will meet up with her parents and then they will spend a year on a planet to study before Jessica will return to her home planet. But even though teleportation is constantly touted as safe, space is still a final frontier where anything can happen. 

She was me. 

Told almost all in first person point-of-view from Jessica, Star Splitter was a scifi mystery thriller that worked to take on some Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind themes of memories, stories and what makes us, us, all in a space setting. Besides having the younger lead, I'm not sure I would categorize this as Young Adult, it felt more fitting to just be scifi fiction. The story was structured in alternating chapters of Before and After, so a mish-mash of linear timelines. Readers first meet Jessica as she wakes up from the printer but not where she was supposed to. She's alone, but she sees a bed someone made that looks to have watched over her as she was printed, and she's not on the ship but a lander of the ship and it's wrecked, with bloody handprints smeared down the corridors. It's a great start to giving the reader a shiver and want to know how and why it all went wrong. 

There are things only one of us can know. 

After the opening, the timeline flips back to Jessica arriving on the ship and everything seems to be going right. The reader then follows as the story chapters flip back and forth as Jessica in the “seems to be going right” timeline and Jessica in the “bloody handprints smeared down the corridors” linear timelines continue on until the ending has them converging and readers get the full story. I enjoyed most of the story's journey, as what teleportation would require of people; their original bodies getting burned up with the scanned “data” (think mind of thoughts, personality, memories, experiences) getting imputed into a new 3D printed body. Having the ability to live again if something happened to your body but only having the memories/experiences of your last data scan. It's the ultimate question this story works to wrestle with, what makes us, us, and if we had the possibility to “erase” bad memories, should we? It's not a theme I think the story accomplished grappling with fully, it got lost in the alien aspects that were added, the “haunting” aliens, corrupted data, and unknown alien civilization. 

“We have to get off this ship.” 

I flew through the first half of this story wanting to know where and how it all went wrong but Jessica is really the only character readers really get to know. Duncan, the ship captain's son and Jessica's age, gets filled out a little more than the rest of the crew and Jessica's parents but he ultimately felt fizzled out on in the end. A feeling I had in the second half and ending of the story; I enjoyed most of the journey but the destination never felt fully reached (realized) in the end. While the looming setting of space, isolation and danger of it, helped to create a good atmosphere, not all the aspects (alien additives) or main theme of how our “data” impacts us, came together in the end. The ending was abrupt in a way that probably served the story but I was left feeling unsatisfied with dangling threads and lack of how it all came together.

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