Star Eaters
By Brooke Carter
Orca Book Publishers: February 2023 release
PB-9781459834675
e-book-9781459834699

Originally published in the Winter 2023 BC Bookworld quarterly magazine.

Orca Book Publishers, based in Victoria, B.C., has had great success over the past two decades with specialized series of books written for teens in the hi-lo (high interest, low vocabulary) category. Orca has attracted renowned writers in other genres to contribute to their trail-blazing literacy line-up like Gail Anderson-Dargatz, Marty Chan, Carrie Mac, Mahtab Narsimham, Eric Walters and Pam Withers. Wilderness adventures, sports, LGBTQ+, romance, fantasy, horror and lots of mysteries pique the diverse reading interests of 12-16 year olds as they strive to make sense of written English — and, bonus, some are translated to French as well.  

Star Eaters, by acclaimed author Brooke Carter, is a novel written for what is likely the most challenging new series, Orca Anchor, developed for teens with a reading level below or at Grade 2. The publisher has integrated design and production features to make reading even more accessible: dyslexic-friendly fonts (typefaces), cream-coloured paper, and a larger page size with wider margins and thus, fewer words per line. Carter’s novel is action-packed yet thoughtful, as it considers the ethics of blindly following orders and thereby causing mortal damage to other species and entire environments. Destin is a young man on a solo space mission to raid the energy sources of other planets. He is alone with his orders from his “owners”, the IRIS Corps, and his own thoughts, which are informed by an illicit cache of books a previous pilot had left onboard. This discovery enriches his mind and elevates the concepts and language of the narrative through Destin’s point of view.

“What world, what kingdom, what shores? Words floated in his mind. They were bits and pieces of old books he’d read.”

The IRIS Corps, predictably, want their young Raiders to stick to training manuals and star maps and do not allow them to read “old books”. Even though this novel is set in the somewhat distant future, the fear of information from other sources and even ancient knowledge still lingers in the minds of those in power. Destin thinks he’s lucky in this regard because he is a solo pilot and no one else, or so he thinks, can discover his contraband stash of books or prevent him from setting foot on another planet if his screen goes blank from time to time. So he is lured by the green of the trees and the blue of real water and the warmth from the only small sun this “pretty planet” orbits…the sun he is supposed to steal with his spacecraft’s energy catcher. Destin loathes his job title: Raider.

He hesitates to follow this order because it will condemn a beautiful place to a sun-deprived death. But he is threatened by his Commander with the loss of his job and with being returned to the massive, dismal orphanage for war orphans from whence he came. Could things get any worse? Why, yes, he has a stowaway on board from the very planet he has just raided! A young woman with golden eyes, desperate to save her home, slipped into his spacecraft while he was looking at the way sunlight danced on the leaves and water.

What teen reader in 2023 is not familiar with war after war in this world? Or of thousands of children being separated, forcibly in most cases, from their parents and put into institutions to wait for adults to free them? Who has not heard of people desperately trying to save their own environment, whether a river valley, mountainside, prairie grassland, polluted lake or entire ocean. People being dehumanized is the age-old strategy of war-mongers and the destruction of other species and their habitats for the sake of profit continually haunt contemporary headlines.

Hence the high interest factor of this superbly written book for teens which pits Destin’s empathy for someone fiercely protective of her homeland against the insatiable need for energy by those in control who falsely declared her planet “uninhabited”. Now Destin is faced with the ultimate decision of his young life.

Award-winning writer Brooke Carter has contributed a timely and thoughtful tale, a social and political allegory and a beautifully depicted budding romance amidst hellish life or death circumstances…at a Grade 2 vocabulary level. It is no small literary feat to investigate the possibilities for the human condition in the future, which any reader would find engaging and pertinent to Planet Earth.