The Twin Stars

A YA Space Fantasy (The Coseema Saga, Book 1)

By: Bridgette Portman

Narrated by: Ulka Simone Mohanty

Olive Joshi is an imaginative sixteen-year-old with OCD. She checks and double-checks that the stove burners are off, avoids driving for fear of causing an accident, and constantly worries about hurting the people she loves. Olive finds refuge from her anxiety in writing stories about Coseema, a magical princess on the distant planet Lyria. Coseema is fearless, confident, powerful, and perfect—everything Olive thinks she’ll never be.

When she falls through a portal into her own abandoned story, Olive finds herself in a world in peril: double suns scorch the planet, the brutal Prince Burnash seeks supreme power, and Coseema has gone into hiding. Bringing back her heroine might be Olive's only hope of saving Lyria and finding her way home. But when her attempt to summon Coseema goes horribly wrong, it's Olive who must flee for her life.

Together with her friends—a bold and powerful poet, a handsome but cursed musician, a renegade soldier with a troubled past, and an adventurous girl from the desert—Olive must face her deepest fears to escape Burnash's tyranny. With the fate of a star system on the line, can Olive find the hero in herself?

The Twin Stars is an engrossing new portal fantasy in the spirit of the Wizard of Oz, the Neverending Story, and the Chronicles of Narnia, with a dash of Star Wars and a sprinkling of Dune. Fans of space fantasy, coming-of-age adventures, unexpected twists and turns, and novels about mental health and self-confidence will love this unique tale about facing what frightens us most.

©2021 Bridgette Dutta Portman (P)2024 Bridgette Dutta Portman

Your world has a story, and its author is you.

Uncomfortable, unsure, uncertain, and unexpected. Olive is all of these things. Yet somehow she wrote down a few sentences, and they formed a world she now inhabits. Is she a god, or just a young girl with an overactive imagination? As the characters investigate her mysterious appearance, and her story, the answers seem always just a bit unreachable, and unconvincing. Will Olive come clean about her origin, or will she uncharacteristically deny who she really is? A compelling opening to a longer adventure is found in The Twin Stars with fantastic imagery and environments. Narration is well-paced and each character has their own recognizable voice. I'm way past the target age for a YA novel, but I was kept interested and invested in the story's progression and ending. [Disclosure: I received this title for free and listened at 1.7x]

imaginative and fun.

The narration is great. She truly captured the personality of her character. Creating such a brilliant world. The story is imaginative and fun. Such an adventure.