Review of How to Steal a Star by Geonn Cannon

This was an entertaining read. I’ve been a fan of Cannon for a while and have read over a dozen of his books. I love anything about maybe going into space, so I had some high hopes on this one. Unfortunately, this was not one of my favorites by Cannon, but I did still like the read.

This is a story about doing anything to reach your dream, even if it puts you in real danger and probable arrest. I liked the general theme of the book quite a bit. I enjoy books where women have STEM jobs and I really liked how positive this book was towards women scientists. I found the book to be very readable and I was entertained from beginning to end. There were a few errors and continuity issues, but I think they were really proofreading issues where the wrong names were used causing something to not make sense. My copy was an early ARC so these types of issues are to be expected so this didn’t affect my rating and I expect the final released copy to be nice and clean.

I do want to make clear that this story is a little out there. What this group of women does is fun to read about, but you have to really suspend disbelief. If you go into this book trying to take it too seriously, you will miss out on the fun. It’s the kind of book you just have to go with the flow and be okay with things even when they are pretty unbelievable.

The reason why I had some issues with this book was the writing style choices Cannon used. Most of the book is in third-person, but only one POV. Third-person with one POV drives me nuts! The whole point of third person is to enjoy the POV of both main characters. I get why Cannon wanted to be in Margot’s POV most of the time, but then give us a wonderful first-person story. Let us into her head so we can really know what it’s like to be a pilot and an astronaut. Instead, the psychic distance to both main characters felt too far away and I couldn’t connect like I wanted to. Both main characters were perfectly nice, and I wished them well, but I didn’t care for them the way I cared about other characters of Cannon’s –like Claire Lance for instance.

There is a romance and I liked it, but it was missing something for me since I could not connect to the characters as I wanted. The characters had some decent chemistry, and they made a cute potential couple, but there was just something missing so it was about an average romance. Nothing that blew me away, but it was pleasant to read about.

While this would not be the first Cannon book that I would recommend to people, if you like books about women scientists, and dreaming about space, you might enjoy this story. As long as you let your imagination run free, and don’t take things too seriously, you should find this to at least be an entertaining read. 3.50 Stars.

An ARC was given to me for a review.