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NOTE: as with all the others I’ve done in the Other Books series, I have not read Star Shapes; this is just pure guesswork and a bit of fun that will hopefully persuade you [and myself] to check out her book.

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This one is quite random – didn’t know the author, didn’t know the publisher – it just popped up somewhere with the word ‘Star’ in it and a space backdrop so…

Is it actually about space?

Looking at the plot synopsis, maybe not:

Kidnapped from downtown Birmingham, Alabama, and taken to the country, our protagonist is pretty irked. Rather than ask for a ransom, her captors make her feed animals and read dusty books.
She is unnerved by the growing realization that something weirder is afoot, and it all ties back to a book of strange constellations known simply as Star Shapes.
People look to the stars to read the future, but sometimes the stars conceal stories from the past.

I’m not from the Deep South, or even American, but I have seen Lemora: A Child’s Supernatural Tale [filmed in California], and that’s what I’m gonna lean on for the following spec. The eerie-dark aesthetic of prohibition era South-Somewhere, the isolation of everything, even interior sets like the bus station, the vampire matriarch who lures young Lila to her lonely vampire town.

And the Star Shapes?

Okay, so it says the kidnappers are uninterested in a ransom, and instead make the MC perform menial tasks and read dusty books…dusty implies they haven’t been read in a while…that or they’re right next to a window with a busy road outside?

I’m guessing an ancient prophecy, possibly related to some esoteric pagan sect that hasn’t been mentioned in a film before.

Or maybe it’s a fictional sect, made up by the author cos everything real has already been mined to exhaustion/extinction/abstraction/death?

Theme?

Predestination? The need to be connected to something larger/out there?

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