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WORK TITLE: Hold Back the Stars
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WEBSITE: https://katiekhan.com/
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A Soap Opera with Sci-Fi Dressing: Hold Back the Stars by Katie Khan
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:University of Manchester, Mus.B, 2004.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Coca-Cola Company, senior digital writer, 2010-11; Abundant, head of social media, 2011-13; Paramount Pictures, head of digital, 2013-17; Warner Bros. Pictures, product liaison, 2017-.
WRITINGS
Hold Back the Stars has been optioned for film by Dan Cohen and Shawn Levy .
SIDELIGHTS
Katie Khan has worked for nearly a decade as a digital writer and head of social media. She worked for Paramount Pictures for four years before moving to Warner Bros. Pictures as a product liaison in film production. Her debut novel, Hold Back the Stars, was released in 2017 and has already been translated into twenty-one languages. It is being adapted for film by producers Dan Cohen and Shawn Levy.
Hold Back the Stars is a sci-fi suspense tale set sometime in the future and in another world—Utopian Europia. The story follows protagonists Carys and Max, who meet and fall in love but cannot marry. Utopia Europia has a Couples Rule, which forbids marriage until couples have reached the age of thirty-five. They are so strict about it that they impose a Rotation system requiring people to move every three years and meant to “to prevent national and community attachment and competing loyalties,” as Liz Bourke notes at Tor.com. As one of the characters in the novel describes it: “The biggest truth about Europia is that it’s almost impossible to live here if you can’t live by the utopian guidelines . . . People who can’t live by the rules of a utopia tend to find it’s not really a utopia, for them. They are the ones who go looking for something else.” Carys and Max sign on for a perilous space mission meant to be a “lab study on long-term romantic relationships” among twenty-somethings. After their space vessel is damaged and repairs prove ineffective, the two find themselves floating in space with no way home and just ninety minutes’ worth of oxygen. Will they both live? Or die?
A critic writing in Kirkus Reviews termed this a “suspenseful novel” but complained that the “characters never fully come alive.” Bourke, reviewer at Tor.com, commented that Hold Back the Stars comes across as “science fictional soap opera.” She went on to observe that the novel tries “too hard to say Deep Things about romantic love, and instead, manages to be more trite and less healthy than the sentiments on a Valentine’s Day card.” In Irish Times, Sara Keating called this “essentially, an enjoyable space romance.” A critic at Little Hux Tales found the “dialogue . . . biting, witty and completely honest” and the “world building . . . excellent.”
Amy Martin, at SciFi Now, applauded the “great pace” and “real sense of intimacy.” At Utopia State of Mind, a contributor described the utopian society as “fascinating,” as well as the “technology of the new age and the concept of rotation.” The critic concluded: “Khan expertly exposes us to little mysteries . . . all to illustrate the nature of fate: how we influence it and how it influences us.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2017, review of Hold Back the Stars.
ONLINE
Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (February 4, 2017), Sara Keating, review of Hold Back the Stars.
Katie Khan Website, https://katiekhan.com (February 3, 2018).
Little Hux Tales, https://huxtales.wordpress.com/ (January 25, 2017), review of Hold Back the Stars.
SciFi Now, https://www.scifinow.co.uk/(March 1, 2017), Amy Martin, review of Hold Back the Stars.
Tor.com, https//www.tor.com/ (May 31, 2017), Liz Bourke, review of Hold Back the Stars.
Utopia State of Mind, https://utopia-state-of-mind.com/ (May 24, 2017), review of Hold Back the Stars.
ABOUT KATIE
Katie Khan is a writer from London whose first novel, HOLD BACK THE STARS, is published in twenty-four countries internationally and translated into twenty-one languages. HOLD BACK THE STARS is being adapted into a film by producers Dan Cohen and Shawn Levy (Arrival/Stranger Things),
directed by Lee Toland Krieger (The Age of Adaline/Riverdale), and exec produced
by Good Universe (The Disaster Artist).
A fan of love stories with epic settings both on the page and on screen, Katie spent 10 years working in online editorial and technology, including 4 years as Head of Digital at Paramount Pictures, before joining Warner Bros. in 2017 to work on a major film production. Named in the 40 Under 40 working in European Cinema at CineEurope 2016, and The Drum's Top 50 most influential people in social media marketing in the UK, Katie was also selected as a Rising Star by The Media Eye.
Katie is represented by literary agent Juliet Mushens, and represented for film rights by
Howard Sanders at UTA.
Katie Khan
3rd degree connection3rd
Production Liaison at Warner Bros. Pictures / Author
Warner Bros. Entertainment Group of Companies University of Manchester
London, United Kingdom 500+ 500+ connections
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Katie Khan is a writer from London whose first novel, Hold Back the Stars, was published in January 2017 in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand by Transworld (Penguin Random House), and will be followed in the USA and Canada by Gallery (Simon & Schuster) on May 23rd, 2017. Hold Back the Stars will also be translated into twenty languages around the world across 2017 and 2018.
A graduate of the acclaimed Faber Academy writing course, and a fan of love stories with epic settings both on the page and on screen, Katie spent 10 years working in digital technology and editorial, including 4 years as Head of Digital at Paramount Pictures UK, before joining Warner Bros in April 2017 to work in film production. Named in the 40 Under 40 working in European Cinema at CineEurope 2016, and The Drum's Top 50 most influential people in social media marketing in the UK, Katie was also selected as a Rising Star by The Media Eye.
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Experience
Warner Bros. Entertainment Group of Companies
Production Liaison, Warner Bros. Pictures
Company NameWarner Bros. Entertainment Group of Companies
Dates EmployedApr 2017 – Present Employment Duration11 mos
LocationLondon, United Kingdom
Penguin Random House UK
Author
Company NamePenguin Random House UK
Dates EmployedJan 2017 – Present Employment Duration1 yr 2 mos
LocationLondon, United Kingdom
HOLD BACK THE STARS was published in January 2017 in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand by Transworld (Penguin Random House), and will be followed in the USA and Canada by Gallery (Simon & Schuster) on May 23rd, 2017.
HOLD BACK THE STARS will also be translated into twenty languages around the world.
Media (4)This position has 4 media
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“Age of Adaline” director Lee Toland Krieger boards “Hold Back the Stars”
“Age of Adaline” director Lee Toland
Krieger boards “Hold Back the Stars”
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Good Universe, 21 Laps Land ‘Hold Back The Stars’ For Lee Toland Krieger To Direct
Good Universe, 21 Laps Land ‘Hold Back
The Stars’ For Lee Toland Krieger To Direct
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Interest in Debut British Novel Heats Up
Interest in Debut British Novel Heats
Up
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Transworld signs 'major' high concept space debut at auction
Transworld signs 'major' high concept
space debut at auction
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Paramount Pictures
Head of Digital
Company NameParamount Pictures
Dates EmployedMar 2013 – Mar 2017 Employment Duration4 yrs 1 mo
LocationLondon, United Kingdom
Key responsibility:
Integrating digital into media, promotions, publicity, creative, and sales, and strengthening the outcome.
Media (4)This position has 4 media
Previous Next
Will Ferrell's Anchorman 2 Is Changing the Way Movies Are Marketed
Will Ferrell's Anchorman 2 Is
Changing the Way Movies Are Marketed
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Marketers should get smarter with digital to get people back to the big screen
Marketers should get smarter with digital
to get people back to the big screen
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How Twitter killed the official movie website
How Twitter killed the official movie
website
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Social media will increasingly shape Paramount Pictures UK TV ads, says head of digital Katie Khan, as she dismisses threat of Netflix
Social media will increasingly shape
Paramount Pictures UK TV ads, says head of digital Katie Khan, as she dismisses threat of Netflix
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abundant
Head of Social Media
Company Nameabundant
Dates EmployedJun 2011 – Mar 2013 Employment Duration1 yr 10 mos
LocationLondon, United Kingdom
(Social Media Manager 2011-2012)
A start-up digital creative agency specialising in film and entertainment. Clients: Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, Lionsgate, Studiocanal and BAFTA.
• Headed up the social media department, managing a team of community managers and social media producers
• Day-to-day management of brands' social profiles and campaigns, across platforms including Reddit, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest
• Content creation - working with our in-house creative studio to oversee interactive application builds, infographic design, video edits, meme creation and blog/website layouts
• Live tweeting and blogging and creating content on the go from events such as premieres
• Outreach to fans, key influencers and film/genre bloggers
• Innovation - regularly updating clients on new and emerging tech and platforms, and where we should be exploring for the future, and then implementing this in new strategy
Key achievements:
• Social Media Agency of the Year finalist, Social Buzz Awards 2012
• Increase in departmental revenue and client roster by 100% in 1 year
• CIM Marketing Excellence Award 2012 nomination for Universal 100th anniversary campaign
Media (1)This position has 1 media
The car, the watch, the make-up, the beer advert: James Bond - licence to print money
The car, the watch, the make-up, the beer
advert: James Bond - licence to print money
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The Coca-Cola Company
Senior Digital Writer / Producer
Company NameThe Coca-Cola Company
Dates EmployedMay 2010 – May 2011 Employment Duration1 yr 1 mo
LocationLondon, United Kingdom
Based at Coca-Cola's retained editorial agency Zone for one year, my duties included:
• Launching the coca-cola.co.uk beta website for Coca-Cola Great Britain
• Defining the corporate Coca-Cola social media strategy in the UK
• Managing both Coca-Cola’s outreach activity in the UK on social media sites including Twitter and Facebook
• Pitching, creating and writing copy for facebook apps for Dr Pepper UK (290,051 likes)
• Project managing the development of interactive elements, from idea through to implementation
• Creating shareable content for communities, such as the Coca-Cola Caffeine Counter for pregnant mothers, working carefully with the mummy blogger community and Mumsnet
• Directing, interviewing and assisting the edit of video features including David Miliband MP (Designated Driver campaign at Christmas) and the Minister for Sport & Olympics (London 2012)
• Undertaking routine daily site updates
• Actively researching, interviewing, writing and publishing articles
• Managing client relationships with multiple stakeholders
• Building relationships with teams and other external agencies including PR, tech and dev, and strategists
• Sourcing and briefing freelancers and subbing submissions
• Managing a site migration from beta into the Stellent CMS system – also fluent in Wordpress, Umbraco, Forge
• Brainstorming creative ideas and developing the content strategy for 2011
• Presenting editorial recommendations in meetings
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Education
University of Manchester
University of Manchester
Degree NameMusB (Hons) Field Of StudyClassical Music (McMyn Scholar)
Dates attended or expected graduation 2001 – 2004
Activities and Societies: McMyn Scholar
South Hampstead High School, London NW3
South Hampstead High School, London NW3
Dates attended or expected graduation 1993 – 2000
Activities and Societies: Music Scholar
A’ Levels: Art & Design (A), English Literature (A), History of Art (A), Music (A)
GCSEs: 10 A*-B: English Lang. (A*), English Lit. (A*), Music (A*), Art and Design (A), French (A), History (A), Mathematics (A), Spanish (A), Dual Award Science (B)
Featured Skills & Endorsements
Content Strategy
See 42 endorsements for Content Strategy
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Endorsed by Tim Patterson and 2 others who are highly skilled at this
Endorsed by 2 of Katie’s colleagues at Warner Bros. Entertainment Group of Companies
Social Media
See 36 endorsements for Social Media
36
Endorsed by Joe Goulcher and 6 others who are highly skilled at this
Endorsed by 2 of Katie’s colleagues at Warner Bros. Entertainment Group of Companies
Social Media Marketing
See 31 endorsements for Social Media Marketing
31
Endorsed by Musa Tariq and 4 others who are highly skilled at this
Endorsed by 2 of Katie’s colleagues at Warner Bros. Entertainment Group of Companies
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Recommendations
Received (2)
Given (0)
Jamie McHale
Jamie McHale
Social & Digital Marketing Manager at STUDIOCANAL Limited
March 10, 2013, Katie was senior to Jamie but didn’t manage directly
Katie is a truly excellent digital marketer who never fails to respond to briefs with a clear and creative strategy. Her passion & knowledge of social media as a marketing tool is second to none.
Giles Pooley
Giles Pooley
Digital Content Producer & UX Designer, with strategic & creative leadership experience on multimedia productions.
May 1, 2011, Giles managed Katie directly
Katie Wood is pure joy to work with. Not only is she a genuinely talented writer – she is also truly a pleasure to be around.
I worked with Katie for little under two years at UKTV, where I was the editor of a number of the network’s websites. Katie, whilst working for another department within UKTV, approached me asking for an opportunity to contribute to our websites’ editorial content.
As soon as I read the sample we had asked her to prepare, I agreed. It was clear from those early pieces that Katie had an amazing ability to create a wide spectrum of articles, covering wildly differing topics, from new and interesting perspectives - whilst still being warm, engaging and very, very funny.
Over the course of the two years, whilst still holding down a full time job in the other department at UKTV and with her manager’s explicit agreement, Katie’s contributions to our websites grew. We began assigning Katie press junkets and events to cover – each time the feedback and the content we received was exemplary.
We also increasingly relied on Katie uncanny proofreading skills. This girl is truly talented and can spot a typo or grammatical error at five hundred paces.
It was with huge pride and a little sorrow that we said good bye to Katie when she moved on to Coca Cola – but our loss was truly Coke’s gain. I remain very proud of Katie – of her energy, her drive, her talent as a writer, and I wish her all the luck in the world. One day, I hope to be able to work with her again.
Contact and Personal Info
Katie’s Profile, Websites, and Twitter
Show more See more contact and personal info
Learn the skills Katie has
Content Marketing: Photos
Content Marketing: Photos
Viewers: 16,332
Marketing Foundations: Customer Decision Journey
Marketing Foundations: Customer Decision Journey
Viewers: 19,148
Writing Articles
Writing Articles
Viewers: 40,504
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Khan, Katie: HOLD BACK THE STARS
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Khan, Katie HOLD BACK THE STARS Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (Adult Fiction) $26.00 5, 23 ISBN: 978-1-5011-4293-2
A suspenseful novel about a young couple fighting for survival in the world of the future.Carys and Max have only 90 minutes of oxygen left. They're floating in space with no way of getting back to their damaged ship. But this isn't the first challenge the two have faced. As they try to find a solution that will get them back to safety, they reflect on their past together. In the Utopian Europia they come from, citizens live their lives on eternal Rotation, spending three years at one posting and then moving on to the next "ever-changing, mixed communit[y]." Europia lives by an ethic of radical individualism. Every citizen acts always and only for himself or herself. But when Max meets Carys, he starts to question the rules he's always supported--including the Couples Rule that requires citizens to wait until they're at least 35 to form permanent relationships and start families. Questioning those rules sets Max and Carys on the path that eventually leads them to undertake their dangerous mission in space together. The ticking clock of their shrinking air supply adds suspense to at least half the narrative, and some readers will enjoy the swoon-y story of star-crossed first love. But this society's need for, and enforcement of, the "Couples Rule" is inconsistently explained and ultimately unconvincing, and the characters never fully come alive on the page. Readers who love doomed young lovers will find a pair of them here--but could find better examples of the genre elsewhere.
BOOK REVIEWS
A Soap Opera with Sci-Fi Dressing: Hold Back the Stars by Katie Khan
Liz Bourke
Wed May 31, 2017 12:55pm 4 comments Favorite This
Hold Back the Stars is Katie Khan’s debut novel. It may have been trying to be literary science fiction, with capital-T Things To Say about life, love, and mortality. Or it may have been trying to be science fictional soap opera, which is pretty much the level it hit for me.
The novel opens with two characters, Carys and Max, floating in space somewhere in Earth orbit. Their vessel has been damaged, and their attempt to repair it went wrong, leading to their current predicament: limited oxygen, no tether to their vessel, and no way back. The first pages made my hackles rise with the expectation of sexism: Carys is panicking, but Max is calm, and he tells her that, “I’ll save you … Like I always do.” It turns out, though, that this is not a terrible sexist book. Heterosexist, maybe, and very much filled with imperialist assumptions, but only as sexist as any novel that takes equality for granted (rather than examining what “equality” means) ever is.
Spoilers follow.
The novel intercuts Carys and Max’s increasingly more desperate attempts to self-rescue with the story of their lives from the point at which they first met. In the future which Hold Back the Stars envisages, Europe is a “utopia” (quotation marks intentional) called “Europia.” People under the age of 35 are required to move every three years, in a process called “Rotation,” to prevent national and community attachment and competing loyalties, and therefore causes for conflict. (Let us skip lightly over the insistent historical truth that humans develop communities which are not necessarily based on physical proximity, and that we can always find something to fight over.) People in each Rotation are assigned to a different “Voivode” and are not supposed to develop long-term relationships, especially not long-term romantic relationships, before age 35—when they can apply for a license to settle down. (As I understand it, the term “Voivoide” derives from words meaning war-leader and has been used to refer to governing officials, not places: no explanation is given in the text for how it has come to mean a geographic-administrative district.)
Carys and Max are in their mid-twenties. Carys flies shuttles for a space programme. Max works in nutrition. They fall in love. Max has to move before Carys does. They try to keep a relationship going long-distance, with weekend visits and communication. Their relationship is rocky. Max’s family are die-hard believers in Europia’s “utopian” system, and he is embarrassed and uncomfortable to be bucking the system at all. They break-up. Carys discovers that she’s had a contraceptive failure and experiences a miscarriage. They get back together. Max brings Carys to meet his parents, and there is an ugly scene in which Max’s parents excoriate him for not following the rules—then, with little consultation with Carys, Max drags them both off to the government-assembly body and petitions to change the Couples Rule. (I guess polyamory isn’t a thing in “utopia” either.) His petition results in said government requesting (requiring) him and Carys to volunteer to go into space, essentially to be a lab study on long-term romantic relationships and how they survive isolation and a highly-pressurised mission environment.
This sounds like cruel and unusual punishment to me, and a very inefficient way of figuring out if people in their twenties can handle high pressures and maintain a healthy romantic relationship—you’d want a population study at least—but then, nothing about the so-called “utopia” or Carys and Max’s relationship really seems healthy to me. Carys and Max don’t really seem to communicate about their relationship, or to fully respect each other. I find this somewhat distressing, in a novel that wishes me to believe in the importance of their romance.
An additional weirdness in the world-building is that Earth is now ringed by asteroids which prevent access to higher orbit. (That is not, my heart cries, how asteroids work.)
So, you have these apparently-not-very-competent astronauts. Who are in love with each other. And stranded in space. Above an Earth that hasn’t had a cataclysmic meteor strike event yet, despite a belt of asteroids surrounding the planet.
Then shit gets weird.
(Major spoilers for the book’s conclusion.)
The last section of the book tells first how Carys survives and Max dies, and some months of Carys’s life after.
Then it tells how Max survives and Carys dies, and some months of Max’s life after.
Then it rewinds, and they’re in space with eight minutes of oxygen left between them, and they can “remember” their lives without the other. And they choose to die together, because neither of them feels like there’s a place in the world for them without the other.
Which, after the soap opera of their lives, I suppose I should have been expecting. But honestly, it plays in to some ridiculously toxic one-true-love myths, and frames grief at the death of a romantic partner as something impossible to live with. It feels like Hold Back the Stars is trying just too, too hard to say Deep Things about romantic love, and instead, manages to be more trite and less healthy than the sentiments on a Valentine’s Day card.
Perhaps it will find an appreciative audience. That audience, however, does not include me.
Hold Back the Stars is available from Gallery Books.
Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Find her at her blog, where she’s been known to talk about even more books thanks to her Patreon supporters. Or find her at her Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council and the Abortion Rights Campaign.
Hold Back the Stars: A space romance with a political edge
Katie Khan’s debut novel charts plight of lovers cast adrift in space from utopian home
Khan alternates the astronauts’ present predicament with flashbacks to their lives in Europia, a futuristic self-styled utopia
Khan alternates the astronauts’ present predicament with flashbacks to their lives in Europia, a futuristic self-styled utopia
Sara Keating
Sat, Feb 4, 2017, 06:00
First published:
Sat, Feb 4, 2017, 06:00
Hold Back the Stars By Katie Khan Penguin Sara Keating
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Book Title:
Hold Back the Stars
ISBN-13:
978-0857524003
Author:
Katie Khan
Publisher:
Penguin
Guideline Price:
£0.00
In the opening moments of Katie Khan’s debut novel Hold Back the Stars, two astronauts find themselves tumbling through space, “two pointillist specks on an infinitely dark canvas”, untethered to anything but each other. As their space ship recedes further into the distance, they realise they have only 90 minutes of air in their oxygen tanks. They are creative and informed thinkers. Carys is a logical pilot with a scientific mind. Her partner, Max, is a more spiritual soul with a firm belief in utopian ideals. Even so, between them they cannot fight the perpetual pull of gravity, which drags them into the deepest part of the asteroid belt, “a godless place outside earth”.
The opening chapter of Hold Back the Stars paints the familiar premise of a sci-fi film with words. As Khan describes the fishbowl helmets and padded suits that insulate Carys and Max from the atmosphere and each other, it is impossible not to see Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in the 2013 film Gravity, for example, floating around as they try to save their own lives. The 90-minute countdown, meanwhile, adds an extra narrative pressure, a well-used convention of blockbuster films. As the premise continues to unfold, it is difficult to dispel the impression that the writer, whose first novel was bought by Penguin in a highly contested auction in 2015, has Hollywood aspirations.
However, there is more to Hold Back the Stars than a future screenplay. Khan alternates the astronauts’ present predicament with flashbacks to their lives in Europia, a futuristic self-styled utopia, whose ideals have managed to sustain almost half a century of world peace. Europia is a constellation of former countries, rebranded as Voivodeships, discrete regions that citizens inhabit by a system of Rotations. They are “everchanging, mixed communities” that allow people to live as individuals “free from national identity or an allied social pressure” and without fear of ethnic or religious discrimination; with “everyone doing their best and giving their all, undistracted”.
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Different beliefs
Some of these individuals, however, have different beliefs: Carys and Max, for example. He is from a founding family, and holds the utopian ideal above all else. She grew up outside the Voivodeships, when there was an outside not riven by civil war and refugees, as the Americas now are. When they fall in love, however, it is Max who starts to question the status quo, challenging one of its fundamental tenets: that men and women cannot commit to each other before they are 35. As a test, or perhaps as punishment, they are sent into deepest space to see if their love can survive the dangers of the asteroid belt. In the final minutes of their lives they have to decide whether their illegal love was worth dying for.
Khan fully imagines the parameters of her future world: from the flick-of-the-wrist “flexing” of thoughts from one individual to another, to the Wall Rivers that line every room, a “constant, scrolling feed of news, weather and updates” that makes the borders of an individual’s living quarters porous. If Max and Carys find Europia to be less the utopia it claims to be, however, neither is it a dystopian dictatorship.
Khan borrows the structure of the Voivodeship from medieval eastern Europe, but the backdrop is curiously ahistorical. We get hints of the world outside Europia; it is “bleak. Aid teams fighting to get water to the refugees left in the US, the middle East annihilated”. But that is as much detail as Khan is willing to let puncture Europia’s idea of political stability, and there is no hint of contemporary metaphor either.
In fact, the closest Khan comes to ideological deconstruction in what is, essentially, an enjoyable space romance comes in a cryptic critique made by Max’s friend Liu, a defector from China. As Liu warns them: “The biggest truth about Europia is that it’s almost impossible to live here if you can’t live by the utopian guidelines . . . People who can’t live by the rules of a utopia tend to find it’s not really a utopia, for them. They are the ones who go looking for something else.” Max and Carys travel beyond the edges of the world looking for that something else, but the only thing they find that far in deepest, darkest space is each other. Their love may survive, but they won’t. How’s that for an uncompromising ideal?
Hold Back the Stars by Katie Khan | 1 Minute Reviews
Posted on January 25, 2017 by littlehux
Today, you must all go to your bookshops to get Hold Back the Stars by Katie Khan, not least because it’s the prettiest book you’re going to see this year.
My copy from Katie arrived at the shop for me some months back and I just finished it in 24 hours, tear stained and overjoyed and in awe.
9780857524003
Set in the future in utopian Europa, Carys and Max meet – she an astronaut in training, he an aspiring chef running his family’s food store business. But the book starts much later, as they fall through space with only 90 minutes of oxygen remaining.
Told in flashbacks and real time, Hold Back the Stars is a story of love in a time where romance is forbidden for young people.
The world building is excellent, with Europa existing through a complicated system of moving people about (“Rotation”), in order to discourage romance and to encourage overall cooperation.
The dialogue is biting, witty and completely honest. I loved it.
BOOK REVIEWS
Review: Hold Back the Stars by Katie Khan
MAY 24, 2017 INAUTOPIASTATEOFMIND LEAVE A COMMENT
What starts off as a story about two astronauts stranded in space and reminiscing, ends up being an emotional, surprising, and incredibly deep book on individualism, love, and free will.
Summary
As Max and Carys are stranded in space with only 90 minutes of oxygen, naturally now is the time to reflect on their life: the beliefs they held on to, the chances they never took, and the decisions they regretted. Drifting above their utopian Earth, the two make amends and dwell in memories as they remember the love between them, a love that is outlawed on Earth. The clock ticks down, and they’re faced with an impossible dilemma: only one can survive, but who will take it?
Review
While reading this book, I felt that it starts off like The Martian, if there were two of them, and ends more like Interstellar. At first we’re all survival mode, and while we see more of their memories together, the real task at hand is problem solving. But as the air dwindles down, Max and Carys become more introspective, vulnerable, and profound. This is when it switches to Interstellar as we witness their memories of a life full of chances, risks, and love.
The utopian society was fascinating to me. It prioritizes individualism, temporality, and adherence to the rules. Furthermore, the technology of the new age and the concept of rotation, is fascinating (especially the modern Olympic Games). In fear of spoiling the sheer ingenuity, I won’t go on, but I am a huge sucker for utopia/dystopias (did my blog name not give it away?). What made me even happier is that Khan talks about the origin of the word, utopia (and the mention that Max hates the name of the plant rapeseed, me too!)
The Characters
Khan has a fabulous writing sense fluctuating between Max’s humor, Carys’ past, and even Liu’s antics. The characters all serve a purpose, but evolve beyond that, becoming loveable and more than their prescribed role. Max and Carys themselves are so different, yet the dynamic between them is both believable, and heart breaking. Their plight and feelings are universal, which only makes the entire book more emotional. Whether it be our need for company, our inability to break free of our past, or our fears that hold us back, these moments as they stare death in the face, are achingly familiar.
From the very beginning, the suspense about their fate is clear, however, Khan takes our assumptions and throws them soundly out the window. The ending will leave you reeling, careening through the air, but it is so worth it. We are challenged to see more than just two lovers in space, or two people confronted with their possible death. We are shown a complicated world, two lives full of memories and strong opinions, and their history which unravels the mystery of how they even got into space. Additionally, Khan expertly exposes us to little mysteries, the mystery of how they keep crossing paths, or how Max got his job, all to illustrate the nature of fate: how we influence it and how it influences us.
In Conclusion,
I could go on and on about this book, about how it shows us our ‘true colors’ at the end, or about how it puts into perspective our fears and regrets. Ultimately, the dynamic between Max and Carys, as well as their story, makes this book even more enjoyable, but also fulfilling (especially at the end). While you may think this book is all about death, or the potential of death, what ends up occurring is a celebration, a reminiscing, on life. However, it’s even more than that, it’s about who we are in those final moments when we think it’s the end. Who are we behind our family, behind our beliefs, behind our fear, and behind our love?
HOLD BACK THE STARS BY KATIE KHAN BOOK REVIEW
Space romance is the order of the day in Katie Khan’s debut Hold Back The Stars
By Amy Martin 30-01-17 38,599 0
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Author:
Katie Khan
Publisher:
Doubleday
Released:
26 January 2017
Buy on Amazon
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The Fault In Our Stars by John Green
Carys and Max live in a world where love is banned. Daring to defy their society, they fall in love under the watchful eye of Europia. But when they become stranded in space with only 90 minutes of air left, what truths will they discover about themselves and their world?
A debut novel from Katie Khan, this story is an unique take on the usual dystopic fictions littering the shelves. At first glance the world seems idyllic, with each member of society contributing in the name of themselves, not government
nor religion.
Every three years, each citizen of Europia rotates to a new country to discourage romantic relationships and continue to better themselves to become the ideal citizen. Only when they have established themselves as productive society members are the allowed to seek a partner and have children.
Max is complete in his devotion to the system, and unwavering in his belief that he is part of a utopia – that is, until he falls in love. Carys demonstrates how love can change the most vigorous perspective, and the progression of the story shows us the tragic consequences when society dictates who you can love and when.
The chapters of the story fly between their current perils to flashbacks of how their relationship began. It creates a great pace, and there is a real sense of intimacy in the slower moments when we know what is to come.
When the couple are facing the prospect of death, the conversations and arguments they have seem very real. Neither of them always say the right thing, they don’t handle the situation with grace and dignity, and they become desperate. They are undeniably human, with human emotions, and that is part of what makes this book a worthy read, which will keep you up past bed time.