A fun finale to the Starlight’s Shadow series…
Capture the Sun is the third, and presumably the last, in Jessie Mihalik’s Starlight’s Shadow series. And it’s a very nice finale, wrapping up the overarching Federated Human Planets (FHP)/Valovian Empire storyline, while somehow also managing a happy ending for a “new couple”, Lexi Bowen and Nilo Shoren.
As with the couples from the earlier books, there’s one (Nilo) from the Empire and one (Lexi) from the FHP, and those different backgrounds lead to lots of chances for miscommunication. When you also mix that with some past emotional damage (which is why I put the quotation marks around “new couple” up above), things get even tougher. Piling it on even more, it’s not like Lexi and Nilo get a lot of time to talk about this – instead they spend a good chunk of the book busy fleeing the evil schemes of the Empress and her agent, Sura Fev. And as if that weren’t enough, in the background, the rest of the Starlight’s Shadow crew are trying to keep the series villain, Frank Morten, and his evil allies from re-starting the FHP/Valovian War – and Lexi and Nilo want to help with that too. Whew! So basically what you have is a romance buried inside a break-neck-paced space opera, but somehow it all works.
All-in-all, I liked Capture the Sun just a smidge more than its series predecessors, mostly because it seemed as if Lexi was a little more honest with herself than the average heroine with communication issues. At one point, in fact, she even says flat out that she doesn’t deal well with emotions. So kudos to her for a bit of self-awareness. And although it’s a little sad to be saying good-bye to the series, it was also a lot of fun to see Morten realizing that his Senate allies aren’t going to be able to save him, and that he’s headed for a prison on Titan. And 🤞 this might not even be a totally final farewell to the Starlight’s Shadow world: there were a couple of little hooks with Liang and Anja, towards the end of Capture the Sun, that make me think that there might be a short-story or novella still to come. But even if not, I’m sure Mihalik will move on to something else that’s fun to read.
Finally, of course, my thanks to Harper Voyager/Avon and Net Galley for the advance review copy! Oh yeah, and one quick side note: the FHP-Valovian War/Frank Morten storyline is rather central to the events in Capture the Sun, so although you could probably still enjoy this book without reading the previous two books, I’d recommend that you do…
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