ARC Review: The Weight of the Stars by K. Ancrum // queer found family, sapphic romance, and I cried a lot

I was kindly sent this book as an advanced copy by the author for reviewing purposes, but all opinions are my own. 

Summary: Ryann Bird dreams of traveling across the stars. But a career in space isn’t an option for a girl who lives in a trailer park on the wrong side of town. So Ryann becomes her circumstances and settles for acting out and skipping school to hang out with her delinquent friends.

One day she meets Alexandria: a furious loner who spurns Ryann’s offer of friendship. After a horrific accident leaves Alexandria with a broken arm, the two misfits are brought together despite themselves—and Ryann learns her secret: Alexandria’s mother is an astronaut who volunteered for a one-way trip to the edge of the solar system.

Every night without fail, Alexandria waits to catch radio signals from her mother. And its up to Ryann to lift her onto the roof day after day until the silence between them grows into friendship, and eventually something more . . .

In K. Ancrum’s signature poetic style, this slow-burn romance will have you savoring every page.

Release date: March, 19th

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★★★★★

Okay let me tell you about this book and not because technically I kind of have to review it but because I just really need an outlet for what I’m feeling after finishing it.

THIS BOOK is very different from The Wicker King but it’s also very similar. But kind of not. I’M ALREADY NOT MAKING SENSE HERE but I’m really trying.

The Weight of the Stars throws you in an initially seemingly familiar contemporary YA setting. You have a MC, Ryann, who is a bit of a troublemaker and doesn’t have a typical teenage home situation, you have the new girl at school, and you have Ryann’s group of friends who don’t belong anywhere so they all belong together. And yet the way everything is presented already announces itself not to be so typical after all, starting from literally every character’s backstory.

By far one of my favorite thing was the found family element in this and all of the different bits of representation we are presented with. We have a mostly (all?) queer cast, a teenage single father with PTSD and selective mutism (I’m not sure if the terminology is correct but this is what I found googling it), a Sikh teen with three parents (two dads and a mom – if you’ve read The Wicker King I’m just going to say that…………you already know his parents), and of course our main f/f couple (I’m not sure exactly how they identify but Ryann says she’s mostly attracted to girls but once had a brief crush on a boy).

While The Wicker King takes you down a spiral where you have no control over your thoughts and feelings and then slowly brings you back to the surface (not a soft surface, but a surface nonetheless), The Weight of the Stars fools you into thinking you have more room to breathe normally when in fact what you should be doing is taking deep breaths in preparation for a final oxygen-less plunge into space.

There comes a point in the novel where you have to let go of your own plane of existence and fully embrace that you’re not in control, and your point of view and your perspective don’t matter anymore. This blank state is all I can recommend when you read the last 30% of this book. Just, don’t let gravity keep you grounded is all I’m saying.

TWs: alcohol and drug use, mention of death of parents, teenage pregnancies, mild violence, hospitals, mention of attempted suicide, mention of homophobia (the d slur)