After a great start to our 2020 book swap, the pressure was on for February. How could we possibly follow on from such high-flying beginnings?

Well, we didn’t do too badly in February either!

Nicola sent me Our Child Of The Stars by Stephen Cox and I sent her The Owl Killers by Karen Maitland in return.

The Owl Killers was one of our Smut Club books in 2018 and it surprised me how much I liked it because it really isn’t my usual fayre. With that in mind I decided to take a risk and share it – it could have gone either way, it’s an unusual book! Luckily, Nicola enjoyed it too. Slow to start (I was the same), but then got sucked in and couldn’t put it down. She also managed to scare herself with the (creepy!) ending thanks to a well-timed Bat-Signal from her son’s room, which amused me rather a lot.

And what did I think of Our Child Of The Stars?

Yet another winning cover design – mysterious and beautiful – a good start!

This book is, quite possibly, the loveliest sci-fi I have ever read. Lovely isn’t usually a word I use about sci-fi but this really was. It was gentle, and heart-warming, and wholesome.

That doesn’t mean it wasn’t exciting, tense, thrilling, and gut-wrenching as well, but overall it left me with the warm-and-fuzzies, which is never a bad thing!

Set in an alternate history of Earth, Our Child Of The Stars takes place in New England in the 1960s, where a huge meteor strike causes havoc in the town of Amber Grove.

Molly, a nurse at the hospital, finds herself taking care of an unusual casualty of the event – a young alien boy, the only survivor of a ship that crashed in behind the meteor.

The general public don’t know about the ship, and Molly and her superior are worried that the young alien would face a life of experiments and misery if the government got hold of him.

And so begins a new life for Molly, as a mother to a child nobody can ever know about. A child with powers nobody understands, from a galaxy nobody even knows exists. Man hasn’t even set foot on the Moon yet, never mind discovered life in other galaxies.

But young children of any species are hard to keep quiet, especially when they are super-social creatures with a desperate need for friends, and a thirst for knowledge and discovery that a life indoors could never satisfy.

A brilliant observation of human behaviours – love, greed, fear, anger, friendship, and hope – Our Child Of The Stars was a beautiful story with lots of heart that I didn’t want to put down at all once I had started it.

5/5*

Another great book swap – I wonder what’s to come for March!

*

Linking up with Mama Mummy Mum‘s Read With Me linky this week ❤