Welcome to the 3rd Weekend Picks for August. Our ongoing thanks to professor Erinn Bentley of Columbus State University for her continued contributions to the blog this month!
 Erinn Bentley | For this weekend’s pick, Dr. Bentley recommends another sci-fi YA novel, Matthew J. Kirby's Star Splitter. Dr. Erinn Bentley is a professor of English education at Columbus State University, where she also serves as the Associate Director of the Center for Global Engagement. She enjoys mentoring pre-service secondary English teachers, graduate students, and her doctoral candidates. In addition to teaching YA literature and pedagogy courses, Erinn leads study abroad programs for education majors in Belize, Ecuador, England, and Japan. |
Star Splitter by Matthew J. Kirby
Chapter one of the sci-fi YA novel Star Splitter opens with this observation: “I don’t care how many prep classes you take, or how many counseling sessions you go through, or how many waivers you sign, none of it actually prepares you to be burned apart by a laser, atom by atom.”
 | This is precisely what our protagonist is preparing to do when we meet seventeen-year-old Jessica on Earth in the year 2199. Six years ago, Jessica’s parents set out on a space colonization mission, and now it’s time for her to join them on spacecraft light-years away. Via teleportation. She’ll fall asleep on Earth and wake up mere days later across the galaxy. The catch? Teleporting requires downloading a bio-scan which will be installed in her newly printed body at the next destination, destroying her original “reference” body. Jessica, though, is not daunted by this prospect. Even her teleportation liaison is surprised that the teen has made the “Big Leap…the moment you accept you are not defined by that one specific body in which you were born. That consciousness is a quantum expression simply housed in a brain.” |
| When Jessica awakens, she is relieved, thinking “I was the first thing I remembered. Me. I was me.” But she quickly realizes something is wrong. She is by herself in an abandoned craft that has crashed into the planet her parents were sent to explore. Alone, she must figure out what happened to the aircraft, its crew, and her parents as well as survive in this unknown place. Then - she suddenly discovers she is not the only human survivor, and things get much more confusing and complicated. |  Matthew J. Kirby |
Due to the many twists in this novel, I won’t summarize any more of the plot. You’ll just have to explore it yourself! Overall, Star Splitter is a fast-paced and engaging read because it’s impossible to predict how past, current, and future events shape Jessica’s survival journey. What makes it a riveting read, though, is how this novel is really about Jessica discovering her own sense of self and what it means to be a person – not just one “defined by a specific body.”
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