Book Review: Stars of the Silver Screen by Teelia Pelletier (Strong Hearts Are Mandatory #3)

 

After having taken a look at the first two Mandatory books, and, after a taking a break from the series, I'm back to review the third here! Spoilers ahead, this is book three.

In this book, Video and her sister Jukebox set out to find the magical-aligned criminal called Screen. This leads them on a journey that causes Video to not only question those around her, but also herself.

Out of the three Mandatory books so far, this was definitely the best. I could get into the characters (sans Radio) a lot more here. 

In earlier books I also had some trouble with telling the characters apart (there's a lot of them and many of them have similar names that end in -io or -eo). That wasn't the case here, most of the characters felt distinct and I could easily tell who is who. 

The pacing was good and the story was engaging. I am getting more of a grasp on the world of this series as times goes on, so that's definitely good. It's still not quite as good as I'd like it to be, but Pelletier is improving here. 

I do still have some grievances from previous books with this one, though. First of all, referring to mages as "it". I know that the author does this to make the characters dehumanize magic-users in this universe, but it just comes off as really uncomfortable to me as a trans person to constantly see the mages who use he/him pronouns be intentionally referred to with it/its pronouns. Though there's less attention drawn to it over here, there's also still the issue of hunting in a world where sentient animals exist. It just comes off as uncomfortable and like the world wasn't fully thought out. In earlier books, creatures such as rats are shown to be sentient, therefore implying other critters that might be hunted as well. This could've easily been avoided by (for example) having only carnivores be sentient, or only feliforms being sentient, etc. There's just so many easy solutions to this problem without having to make the worldbuilding feel questionable. 

I did actually like the inclusion of a non-binary character in this book, although they didn't have a huge presence. But this definitely leaves up the possibility for more (prominent) trans/non-binary characters in future books.

Overall, this is definitely an improvement over the past few Mandatory books. However, unfortunately it's too little improvement to warrant an extra star. This one is definitely closer to being rated three and a half stars than the other two, but it doesn't quite make it yet and issues of the previous two books weren't massively improved upon. I still wish Pelletier the best and hope they continue their series and improve more!

Rating: 3/5