The Stardust Grail

January 1, 2024

Kitsasei's (The Deep Sky) space heist story gets a 75K-copy first printing. Before a disastrous job forced her into hiding, Maya Hoshimoto was an art thief, returning stolen artifacts to alien civilizations. A new job she can't refuse sends her on a quest for an object that could save an alien species--but may have other consequences too. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2024

Maya Hoshimoto is a thirtysomething graduate student at Princeton University. She left behind her life as an art thief, one who specialized in stealing alien artifacts and returning them to their civilizations. Now that she's in hiding because of her disastrous--and deadly--last job, Maya plans to stay on Earth for the near (and far) future, but then her old friend Auncle, who is a member of the alien species called the Frenro, asks for her help to find a powerful object that has been missing for over two centuries, an object that could save the Frenro from extinction. Maya joins Auncle and their crew on this quest, but there are others who are also looking for the object, and even more who are willing to destroy the object and the Frenro entirely. Plus, Maya is having visions of a future that seems to hold betrayal and the possible destruction of humanity. VERDICT Kitasei (The Deep Sky) writes an emotional roller coaster of a space quest, highlighting friendship, family, and the ostracism of those believed to be different. The prose is as intimate as the universe is wide.--Kristi Chadwick

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 8, 2024
Kitasei’s outstanding sophomore outing clears the high bar she set in The Deep Sky, combining a high-stakes space adventure with exquisitely crafted worldbuilding and plausibly imagined interspecies communication. Maya Hoshimoto, a doctoral student studying comparative cultures, is haunted by her past as a notorious art thief who pulled off daring, dazzling heists until finally being caught. After escaping from prison alongside Auncle, a member of the tentacled Frenro species, creators of the Interstellar Web that connects the universe’s solar systems, who have “a sort of peripheral vision of the past and future of certain versions of the universe,” she’s lying low. Maya’s life is upended again, however, when she learns that a lost record of an expedition in search of the stardust grail, an artifact essential to the continued survival of the Frenro, has resurfaced, even as an unknown force has begun to destroy the nodes linking the universe’s solar systems. These developments take Maya back into space, and to a reunion with Auncle, to find the last remaining grail, and avert disaster. Kitasei makes the duo’s search more than a MacGuffin hunt, ensuring emotional involvement by gradually revealing the morally ambiguous choices Maya made in the past and might be tempted to repeat. Readers will be riveted.

April 15, 2024
A reformed thief sets out on one final heist across the universe. After her last attempt at stealing alien artifacts went disastrously wrong, Maya Hoshimoto has settled down, interning in Princeton's archives and working on her graduate degree while her friend and partner in thievery, Auncle, remains among the stars, searching for the grail that might save xyr dwindling race. When Maya happens upon a field notebook key to finding the grail, she resists only momentarily before returning to Auncle. But Auncle and Maya are not the only ones on the hunt. The nodes that connect Earth to other planets and space-capable people are degrading, and the Earth's military coalition wants the grail to save the nodes. With Earth's military and Princeton and Yale faculty on their heels, Maya and Auncle race across many worlds following in the footsteps of a human explorer who disappeared more than 100 years ago. Along the way, they grapple with the vast gap between cultures that developed on separate planets, the ethics of theft and museums, and what it means to be human--or alien--all while trying to cause as little destruction as possible. Broad in scope, covering everything from the rise and fall of alien civilizations to what it means to be a person, this is a luminous work, vacillating between the highs and lows of human experience and how they might translate across alien worlds. Sympathetic, flawed characters demonstrate how individual actions can reverberate through the past and future. Wondrous, new, and altogether alien.

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June 1, 2024
Maya Hoshimoto grew up off-world and is getting used to her second attempt as a graduate student in comparative cultures at Princeton. A recent delivery includes a book that could be the key to finding the stardust machine and an opportunity to make good on a promise to her old friend and partner in illicit activities, Auncle. Just as the book arrives, Auncle appears, asking Maya to join them on a job tracking down the stardust machine they hope will help repopulate her decimated species. Dr. Garcia, a foremost expert in foreign space travel, also arrives and asks Maya join him on an expedition to retrieve the same artifact, believing it will help humanity create new nodes between star systems and prevent the isolation of Earth from the Outer Worlds as the nodes are disappearing. Maya's search for the stardust machine reads like an entertaining mix of an interstellar Indiana Jones adventure and an Ocean's Eleven caper, with academic research, leading to interstellar adventures leading to clues, leading to acquiring the most important artifact in the known galaxy.

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