Stray: Touchstone Part 1
Touchstone, no. 1
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4.5 • 21 Ratings
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Publisher Description
On her last day of high school, Cassandra Devlin walked out of exams and into a forest. Surrounded by the wrong sort of trees, and animals never featured in any nature documentary, Cass is only sure of one thing: alone, she will be lucky to survive.
The sprawl of abandoned blockish buildings Cass discovers offers her only more puzzles. Where are the people? What is the intoxicating mist which drifts off the buildings in the moonlight? And why does she feel like she's being watched?
Increasingly unnerved, Cass is overjoyed at the arrival of the formidable Setari. Whisked to a world as technologically advanced as the first was primitive, where nanotech computers are grown inside people's skulls, and few have any interest in venturing outside the enormous whitestone cities, Cass finds herself processed as a 'stray', a refugee displaced by the gates torn between worlds. Struggling with an unfamiliar language and culture, she must adapt to virtual classrooms, friends who can teleport, and the ingrained attitude that strays are backward and slow.
Can Cass ever find her way home? And after the people of her new world discover her unexpected value, will they be willing to let her leave?
Customer Reviews
Get lost in another 🌎 world
This story blew my mind👍👍💯💯💯📚💯💯💯🙏
It a fantastic science fiction fantasy story with a slow burn romance later in the series.
I got lost in this world of Andrea Hosts and I wish it was a listening book or audio so I could listen to this story.
The imagination of this author is amazing 😉 and it’s easy to read with a strong but sensitive and sensible female character.
This whole series is in my top 20 all time favourite 📚 books. 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏
YA SF with psychic space ninjas, what's not to like?
Stray is about Cass, a Sydney teenager, who falls into a wormhole to another planet on her way home from her last HSC (High School Certificate) exam. In her school uniform and equipped only with her history notes, pencil case, an empty drink bottle, and a blank diary she'd bought as a present, she finds herself in a forest, all alone. The story is told through her diary entries.
Stray starts off as a survivor story with Cass having to find food and water — and not get eaten by anything herself — on the planet she's been transported to. It was believable; Cass didn't have some secret past as a hard core scout or anything so she was mostly going off common sense and random snippets of half-remembered information. Eventually, after chasing sheep around for their wool and several brushes with death, Cass is rescued by psychic space ninjas (her phrase) and the bulk of the story takes place in an advanced alien society. With psychic space ninjas.
I recommend Stray to fans of science fiction and perhaps space opera (although it's not quite space opera as I understand the definition) and science fantasy.