Sky Without Stars is more than just a rehash of Les Misérables

Retellings of old classics are easy to find, but Sky Without Stars distills the good parts of Les Misérables in a way that feels fresh.

These days, we’re more familiar with the Broadway version of Les Misérables than the massive source material from Victor Hugo, and authors Jessica Brody and Joanne Rendell have taken their notes more from the distillation for Sky Without Stars, the first book in the System Divine series, which dropped last week.

In fact, it’s even further distilled and swapped around here and there, with additional plot points not in the source material put in to create a massive conspiracy. (Remember how Marius’ grandfather is something of a big deal? In Sky Without Stars, Marcellus’ grandfather is an even more prominent character.) It’s all also done without even approaching the length of the unabridged novel, though it does nearly break the 600-page mark.

The book is told from the perspectives of three characters: Alouette (Cosette), Marcellus (Marius), and Chatine (Éponine). All three of them thus get a lot of interiority, and there’s time for relationships to develop and expand between the three of them. Is Marcellus still a bit blindly in love with Alouette? Yes. But he and Chatine also spend a lot of time together, filling in more of her feelings for him as well. You’ll likely find yourself rooting for Chatine over Marcellus and Alouette, if you prefer characters with common sense, but even the latter two have their redeeming qualities. It’s just that Chatine gets the most satisfying growth, at least for this reader.

But at the same time, those good-to-great decisions in plotting and characterization really highlight one of Brody and Rendell’s weaker choices: when and where to incorporate French words, or just French-looking spellings of different words (for example, cruisers are “cruiseurs,” not the current French word: croiseur). The planet Laterre is essentially just planetary France, so the dropping of French names like Alouette makes sense, but the use of actual French (like métre for meter) versus French-looking words really sticks out.

Pointedly, Brody and Rendell place an emphasis on the written word, specifically, calling it the Forgotten Word and putting it as something major that not everyone can read or write anymore. Are there still some funky choices made with how the Word is presented? Absolutely, but there are no spoilers here. All in all, the worldbuilding in the linguistic choices is just a little shaky, and might make it tough to sink into the story for readers who have even a passing knowledge of French. It’s a shame, since there are other particularly interesting bits, including some of the technology present on Laterre.

At the same time, though, it’s not like the book isn’t good enough to keep readers around for a second title in the series; there are just enough cliffhangers to keep an audience intrigued, and the revolution brewing doesn’t seem as futile as the one in the source material — at least not yet.