CassaStar

Debut novelist Cavanaugh’s maiden space flight tells a familiar story. Byron lost his parents at an early age. Abandoned by his older sister to a group home, he rebels against authority and refuses to let anyone get close to him. Like many young men with troubled histories, he joins the military to have a better life and enters training to become one of the elite Cosbolt fighters. This goal requires Byron to drop his defenses and telepathically bond with a navigator so he can use his ship’s teleportation device to jump from point to point in space. In the process, he discovers some unusual abilities. This formulaic space opera aspires to be a bildungsroman for its petulant hero, but it confuses the archetypal with the clichéd. (Oct.)