In a message from the editor in this ARC, he describes Bright Objects by Ruby Todd as loosely inspired by the Heaven’s Gate cult. I feel like this might be a little bit of a misstep to associate the two. There are some similarities, in that the book also features a cult that viewed a comet in the 1990s as a sign that they should all kill themselves. But the book only talks about these events at the very end, and it isn’t the driving force behind the novel.

In actuality, Bright Objects is a super slow-burn story about a woman who is still trying to recover from the hit-and-run death of her husband two years prior. She uses her grief from the accident to pursue leads to track down who was responsible, and then finds herself drawn to a mysterious man that shows up to her work. There are threads of the cult that get introduced, but it felt much more like a secondary storyline to me than the prominent one.

This book is definitely not for readers that like a lot of action and twists and turns. Todd’s writing is very pedantic; I did feel like her style was so different that I found myself having to read sentences more than once just to get the hang of what she was trying to say. Maybe this just speaks to my intelligence level, but this made the book a little more challenging to read. That’s not to say this was a bad thing (I certainly learned some new vocab words!), but it could be a turn-off for some readers.

Although I didn’t necessarily enjoy every aspect of this reading experience, I can say that at the end of the book, I felt more warmly towards the characters and the overall plot. Everything was wrapped up nicely in the end (even if it was a tad predictable), and I felt like I understood the characters a lot better by the completion of the story.

All of this to say, there’s only a specific group of readers I’d recommend this to. As an ephemeral view of the world (with lots of astronomy thrown in), it definitely won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. But I’m very glad I read it and would be interested to see what Todd will take on for her second book.

4 stars

*Free ARC provided by Simon & Schuster in exchange for an honest review*