Red Star Rebels by Amie Kaufman

Title: Red Star Rebels

Author: Amie Kaufman

Genre: Science Fiction

Publisher: Allen and Unwin

Published: 28^th January 2026

Format: Paperback

Pages: 288

Price: $24.99

Synopsis: From the NYT bestselling co-author of Illuminae and Aurora Rising comes a high-stakes, high-chemistry sci-fi romp filled with witty banter and clever high jinks about a stowaway girl and the richest boy in the galaxy, racing the clock to outwit a gang of mercenaries.

Eight hours to stop an explosion …
Eight hours to fall in love.

It’s 2067, and the Graves family has transformed Mars from a lifeless rock into a chaotic patchwork of settlements. You can buy a one-way ticket to a new life – if you’re rich.

Enter Hunter Graves: handsome, ambitious, and with spectacularly bad timing. He shows up unannounced at the United Nations base just as an emergency evacuation sends everyone scurrying for safety. And he’s left behind. Uh-oh.

Also stranded: Cleo, a sharp-tongued stowaway with no intention of dying today, and even less patience for overconfident trust fund boys. But the enemy of your enemy is the jerk who might just help you survive, so here we are.

Now, Hunter and Cleo have one shot to stop the explosion, escape alive, and deal with the inconvenient fact that they’re falling for each other.

~*~

It’s 2067, and the United Nations has a space arm that explores Mars. There is also one family in charge of it all – the Graves family. They have transformed Mars into a chaotic patchwork of settlements…but only if you’re the ‘right’ kind of person. Rich people can buy a one-way ticket to a new life, but if you’re not rich like Cleo? Well, it’s a lot harder and you’re more likely to be left behind in this egotistical, class-based system where every country is in it for themselves, and the big powers like the USA, Russia, India and a few others yield all the power.

So let’s meet Hunter Graves, aged seventeen, handsome, ambitious but he has super bad timing. Nobody expects him to show up at the United Nations base, and there’s definitely something going on that is linked to things that happened to Hunter and his family five years ago, things that had far-reaching consequences that altered their lives forever. But he’s about to be stranded because of the emergency evacuation.

Cleo, a stowaway to Mars is also stranded, and she’s throwing barbs at Hunter with her sharp tongue and determination not to die. He’s supposed to be her enemy, but here they are, stuck together, trying to survive. Oops. So what are they going to do? Well, I got the sense that they’d rather just walk away from each other, but the emergency has forced these two unlikely allies together. Let’s just hope they don’t make things worse for each other. They both have secrets too, secrets that they don’t want to reveal and things that they think the other person could never possibly understand. For Hunter, how could anyone understand the pressures of being a Graves? For Cleo, can Hunter ever see that only benefitting people with money will work? In doing this, the novel provides a social commentary on class systems that it seems never really went away in 2067. In fact, the novel suggests they have become more entrenched. This shows that these systems are something that people will always take advantage of. The rich will take whatever they want at the tip of a sword or in any way they can. Everyone else has to put up with it.

Hunter and Cleo have eight hours to get away or stop the impending explosion, and they have to find out who is behind it all. Who wants to take out this settlement and why? Does somebody in Hunter’s family have something to do with it? Hunter and Cleo find that they can only trust each other, they hope. Or can they? Can they get beyond their dislike and distrust of each other? Or will the pressure reveal things they didn’t want each other to know?

Red Star Rebels is a fast-paced, time-condensed science fiction novels for young adults. It uses the classic closed room trope in the settlement to explore the depths of human emotion and how far people will go to keep themselves safe, or what position they will have to be forced into to work with someone that you’re supposed to hate because of who they are or what they represent. Both perspectives are told in first person, though there is always an element of wondering what will happen and whether everyone will make it out alive.

Each chapter is signposted with how long they have left for their quest, and goes between Cleo and Hunter’s perspectives. This heightens the tension, as the reader gains insight into each character that the character doesn’t get to know until things get intense and dangerous for Hunter and Cleo. I felt that the tensions of survival were more powerful than the fledging romance between the characters, as to me, the survival was what made the novel work and what drove the novel powerfully.  And the chapters are short, and a bit choppy, reflecting the need to get through the story, to maintain the sense of panic and unease and a good way to engage readers who might prefer shorter chapters and books. It works well though, because all of these factors come into play to carry the novel through to its conclusion.

Whilst not a huge science fiction fan, this book did interest me, and I like seeing how different types of closed room mysteries and stories happen. It’s an intriguing young adult novel, and one that is sure to capture the interest of science fiction fans and fans of young adult literature.