REVIEW: StarLion: Thieves of the Red Night
Now this might seem like it’s coming completely out of left field. I mean, how many of you have even heard of this book? Not much at all, right?
Well, I’ve followed the author, Leon Langsley, on social media for a while. Alongside our different conversations about stuff on the author-side, he’s been at panels at Comicon and had several signings in Barnes and Nobles, and with so many more reviews on his work, I honestly aspire for that kind of success for my own work. Plus, it’s often pitched as a mix between Percy Jackson and My Hero Academia, and has a huge MHA fan (literally rewatching the openings as I write this), I had to check it out eventually!
And so, now was the time. Coming after the horrific ending of Golden Son, before finishing up the trilogy with Morning Star, it was a huge shift in tone, switching to something more familiar and YA. I even expected that from the description, proposing a superhero school setup with some mystery elements. I already had a feeling the culprit would be one of the teachers, a group of friends would assemble to fight the bad guys together — all familiar stuff.
WE'RE SO BACK, TO...
The sheer stakes and how often and aggressively the narrative would flip to “IT’S SO OVER!” would surprise me. Through the main character and even the side characters, this book is written with so much anxiety and conflict from beginning to end, like when the main character, Jordan, got caught using his powers and his uncle emphasized how screwed he was, and how even more screwed he’d be if he didn’t succeed in finding the thieves. Even after that, he kept constantly getting strikes towards expulsion when he tried to pursue the thieves, and combined with the subplots of two other main characters, Cooper and Reuben, a half-animal and a demon, constantly doubting their place due to how society treats their kind, this book was so emotionally charged.
Even if the beats felt familiar to the point of predictability, in a story sense, it’s one of those cases where, they’re executed so well, it doesn’t matter that it’s not reinventing the wheel — it’s some damn good wheels.
But no shopping cart can have four good wheels. In this case…
THE SHAKY WHEELS
There’s a huge elephant in the room when it comes to this book’s flaws, but first, the villain. The main antagonist’s motive is a twist on what I’ll call the Symbol of Peace trope, a combination of Big Good and The Paragon. Starlion’s story takes place after the Green Night, a cataclysmic event that cost the lives of several of the most powerful superheroes and casts a shadow of trauma across the entire cast.
Here, the villains are collecting a few powerful macguffins, but while the second in command was told it’s to prevent the Green Night, the main villain reveals that he actually plans to use them to re-trigger that catastrophe and empower himself enough to defeat it and turn himself into a Symbol of Peace, to solve the apparently horrible rising crime rate and give the people the hero they lack.
But…neither of those are true.
A few of the strongest heroes who survived the first Green Night are still alive and kicking, and three of them literally help in the final battle. On top of that, the superhero school that the main character attends still exists, so new heroes are still being churned out, and we don’t get any sense of any particularly high crime rate or lack of heroes until the main villain tells us that it apparently exists.
For comparison, My Hero Academia is the best example of this Symbol of Peace trope, since I stole the name from All Might. But over there, we literally see and feel the shift after All Might loses his powers and even moreso after public trust in heroes completely drops. We watch villains become more bold, we watch Hero Society and Japan collapse, so the lack of a Symbol of Peace is evident because we, as the audience, witness the effects.
Not here. It completely sabotages the villain’s motivations, but on the bright side, we don’t know the villain’s motives at all until the very end, when they’re revealed. While that might be a sin on its own, it also means the critical flaw of his motives aren’t relevant until you’re already neck-deep.
The magic system here was also a bit weak, even for a YA novel. The premise of being a superhero school-type setting implicitly promises unique powers and all that, but in practice, the system’s built on every character manipulating Plasma in “different ways”. I use airquotes, because with the exception of the half-animal secondary main character, almost every character either enhances their strength, creates things with plasma, or shoots energy blasts. Different colors, different themes, but it’s the same. You don’t get that same fun from MHA of seeing how the cast’s unique quirks interact.
The real elephant in the room, though?
EDITING ISN'T CHEAP
The technical elements.
Oh, the technical elements.
As self-published authors, sometimes, we don’t have the money to afford proper professional editing. I know that struggle firsthand. I edit all of mine manually.
Even then, I read this as an eBook, and the first chapter had lines indented too far. Throughout the entire book, there are sentences straight up missing punctuation or using improper grammar. Even more, you know the thing where, when you move to a different character/location, books will usually have a blank line or a marker to explicitly mark a new scene?
Nah.
Often times, one paragraph will be one scene, and then the next paragraph will be a different character in an entirely different unrelated location.
Even outside of grammar issues, at times, it felt like the characters were mere steps away from staring the camera right in the face and repeating the themes directly at us. It’s a very direct book and it can be hamfisted with portraying its themes, but it is YA, and I don’t mind the directness since those themes are solid, but the errors aren’t as excusable.
I don’t want it to sound like I’m ripping into the book, though. It has a lot of technical errors, the writing is simplistic and hamfisted, the villain’s motivations are weak, and the magic system’s shallow, but the sheer depth in the setting and the whirlwind of emotions behind every page and every character still pulled me along to the very end. The direct and hamfisted writing feels so genuine in how it portrays anxiety in one moment, and then pure black culture in another, and it all kept me so hooked, I read half of it in a day.
When that happens, I can never say I hated a book, and I definitely can’t say I hated a book with such fire art.