hattered Sky is the final volume of the Star Shards trilogy, a contemporary fantasy thriller that began with 1995's Scorpion Shards and continued in 1999's Thief of Souls. While it builds on the characters and plot lines of its predecessors, Shattered Sky includes sufficient backstory to bring new readers up to speed.
The book opens with the most powerful of the Star Shards, 17-year-old Dillon Cole, in jail for what amounts to breaking the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Dillon's ability to generate a reverse-entropy field has led to his becoming the "guest" of the U.S. government in a maximum-security covert military facility. There he summarizes the events of Scorpion Shards and Thief of Souls for a psychological profiler.
Sixteen years ago, a star known as Mentarsus-H, or the Scorpion Star, went supernova. At the same instant, six children were conceived on Earth, three boys and three girls: Dillon, Deanna, Winston, Tory, Michael and Lourdes. Each child received a fragment of the star's shattered soul and, with it, a unique super power. Ever since, Dillon explains to the profiler, it's been one crisis after another: "For years each of us was plagued by parasites that leeched onto our bright souls ... but we purged them. Then we were manipulated and used by a spirit predator ... but we defeated it." These victories did not come cheaply. Deanna perished in the struggle against the parasites, and Michael and Tory died fighting the spirit predator, a soul-devouring entity named Okoya.
Now Dillon senses a greater threat approaching. Only the six Shards can defeat it. Luckily, one effect of Dillon's reverse-entropy field is the resurrection of the dead; he can restore Michael, Tory and Deanna to life ... if he can find their bodies. With the aid of Lt. Maddy Hass, who falls in love with him, Dillon escapes from his prison and goes in search of Winston and Lourdes, the surviving Shards.
Dillon soon finds himself facing an old enemy: Okoya. Dillon defeated Okoya by infecting him with two of the soul parasites and forcing him to flee to his home dimension, a dark realm of pure spiritual energy. But Okoya is back with a chilling warning: The parasites unleashed by Dillon have rendered the dimension of the spirit predators uninhabitable, and now the predators are coming to Earth to return the favor.
The three most powerful predators are already here, preparing to open a dimensional rift that will admit their fellows. Meanwhile, they have turned one of the Shards against the others. The only hope seems to lie with Okoya. He will help Dillon save the Earth ... for a price: all the human souls he can devour.
A graphic novel without graphics
It's difficult to read Shattered Sky—or, indeed, any of the books of the Star Shards trilogy—without thinking of comic books like X-Men and New Mutants. The by-now-familiar formula of teenagers who suddenly find themselves in possession of super powers that prove to be as much curses as gifts, and which turn them into freaks as well as heroes, remains an appealing one. Shusterman knows the formula well. All six Star Shards, especially Dillon, who emerges in this novel as the trilogy's most fully realized character, are moody, broody teenage romantics in the angst-ridden tradition of Peter Parker. Their struggles to understand, accept and control their new abilities—while learning, more from necessity than inclination, to trust and depend on each other—make these books intermittently compelling fare. Indeed, Scorpion Shards, the first and best book of the trilogy, is hard to put down.
But Shusterman soon runs into the same problem that plagued the creators of Superman: His characters grow far too powerful for soul parasites, spirit predators, the U.S. military or anything else—short of incarnate shards from another star—to threaten. The only things that can defeat the Star Shards are the Star Shards themselves. There is, alas, no villain in these pages of the stature of a Magneto or Dr. Doom; the bad guys in Shattered Sky serve as little more than metaphors for psychological weaknesses and wounds in each Shard that he or she must face and conquer ... which, predictably enough, they do.
Shusterman seems to have recognized on some level that he was painting himself into a corner. The frenetic plot of Shattered Sky reads like the increasingly frenzied attempts of an author to extricate himself from his own trap. Fortunately, this distracts from the inevitability of the outcome by providing entertaining moments along the way. For sheer authorial chutzpa, it's hard to beat the character of Elon Tessic, a Jewish billionaire who harnesses Dillon's powers to resurrect the victims of the Holocaust ... though, in the event, since Dillon has no control over his power, it's hard to see why his visits to concentration camps only restore Jews to life. What about gypsies, gays and political prisoners, to say nothing of the occasional Nazi? Why aren't they being resurrected as well? But that's another thing that Shusterman's book shares with Superman comics: gaping plot holes it's best not to look at too closely. (Whether this is a legitimate fictional use of the Holocaust is another matter, one which readers must decide for themselves.)
