Our Child of the Stars is available in hardback, paperback, e-book and audiobook. Any decent bookshop can order it (no book stop stocks everything so don’t waste time hunting for it).
You can always ask a library to stock it. Yay libraries! I get a few pennies every time someone takes it out.
It is available in English only. It’s on both sides of the Atlantic and in Australia and New Zealand.
The sequel is Our Child of Two Worlds, out now. They are two halves of the same story. I do think reading Stars before Two Worlds is a good idea although some people who only read the second one enjoyed it without issue.
Book Group Notes. There are some notes in the paperback. It is the ideal Book Group book – strong female lead, tackles lots of popular themes, unusual from a genre viewpoint, most people who read it loved or liked it, but it usually provides things to argue over.
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I will have seen reviews unless they are in something deeply obscure. I don’t need to be sent them and while I try to be a grownup, I probably won’t want to discuss critical ones. People’s opinion can differ from mine.
CONTENT
How did you come to write the book?
Here’s one account
How big an influence was E.T. on your writing?
I’d be an idiot not to see some influence. True story, it was subconscious. I’d never seen ET all the way through, then a reader of an early draft mentioned it. I’m happy to be compared to one of the iconic films of the last century. Yet… ET is a simple film about childhood, seen always from the child’s viewpoint. Our Child of the Stars is an adult book about the joys and fears of parenthood, and how children help you see the world anew – told primarily from the adult viewpoint. In addition, Cory sees Earth from outside, and as children can do, he calls humanity out on our cruelties and ignorance. ET changes Elliott, but Cory changes the world.
I have also had people see the influence of Superman which shows a broader point. Because Superman draws on early myths going back to Biblical times and the Greek myths, among others.
How much research did you have to do before writing a female narrator?
Flip answer: if as a man you haven’t listened to women for all your life, research won’t help you.
Perhaps less sarcastic, I come from a family of strong women, including marrying one and raising one. I’ve been really conscious of differences between the way men and women broadly see the world (sidestepping how much of life is a spectrum and why these differences exist.) Seeing the way my mother sorted the world out with her friends round the kitchen table and how different that was to my wonderful father intrigued me. A flavour of that is in the book.