Claudia Gray — who also wrote “Star Wars: Lost Stars” and “Star Wars: Bloodline” — has written the book “Defy the Stars," an interplanetary story of unrequited love.

The book is set in an area called the Loop. The Loop consists of five separate planets, and each is connected by a Gate, which is a stabilized wormhole.

The main characters of the novel are Abel and Noemi Vidal. Abel is a “mech”, or a robot that is capable of human intelligence. Earth, where Abel comes from, and Genesis, where Noemi comes from, are at war. Earth’s natural resources have been nearly used up, so they want to move to a new planet — Genesis.

So when the two meet, they have a fight, but when Abel learns that his creator is not on the ship he is forced to obey his programming and follow the orders of the highest ranking human around him, which is Noemi. The two have an uneasy alliance as Noemi learns that she can end the war. 

The two embark on a journey around all five planets of the Loop, gathering what they need to break Genesis’s Gate and stop the Masada Run, which is where numerous soldiers of Genesis’s army will attempt to ram the Gate to shut it down in a suicide run. The only way to stop it is by sacrificing Abel, and Noemi is willing to do just that. But by the end, Noemi has had a change of heart and stops Abel from destroying the gate. The Masada Run is prevented, and Noemi gets promoted to lieutenant. 

Overall, I would rate “Defy the Stars” a 3.5 out of 5. It has a solid plot, I noticed very few typos, and the book is well paced. Gray has enough science in her book to make it science fiction, but a lot of things go unexplained. I also think that the ending of the story was a bit unsatisfying, but it is a series. The sequel to “Defy the Stars” is “Defy the Worlds”.

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