I found Libbie Grant before I discovered her penname Olivia Hawker. We were mutuals in the writing community on social media and she posted this amazing story of encountering an ex standing in line behind her at some kind of food or coffee shop and the cashier gushing over one of her books…One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow.
When I looked up the book, I was floored. It was a huge best-seller with thousands of gushing reviews. My wife and I later read the book and we both loved it.
When Libbie Grant started posting about the new book she was working on about UFOs and Roswell, I knew I had to read it. I was lucky enough to get an ARC ahead of its planned April, 2025 release.
Olivia Hawker’s The Stars and Their Light is an entertaining and original piece of historical fiction. Using the backdrop of the still unsolved mystery of the UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, Hawker explores questions of faith and science in an accessible and riveting way. She expertly depicts Cold War paranoia tempered by the natural human desire to wonder.
Like in her previous works, the characters come across as real, dynamic, and sympathetic. Here we have a troubled young nun, military personnel questioning their sanity and safety, and star-crossed teens trying to make sense of their lives. One of those teens, Betty, is afflicted with religious stigmata anytime she touches a piece of the physics defying wreckage from the infamous crash.
The novelty here is the sci-fi/mystery angle, something you don’t see merged with historical fiction very often. Hawker pulls it off quite nicely while still weaving in her signature poetic internal observations, getting deep inside her characters’ heads and hearts. I enjoyed the epilogue that showed us the fate of our main characters, as well as the author’s notes at the end on what inspired the novel and the depth of the research she did on Roswell and UFOs.
I encourage you to take a chance on this unique novel when it’s released this spring. I couldn’t help but think it would also make a great limited streaming series.
The Schleicher Spin 