Review: CHANGE THE STARS.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 29, 2014
A battle for control of a west Texas territory run by crime boss Colton Piper is brewing.  To protect his interests, Colton promises his daughter, Maggie, to one of his rivals.  Events quickly spiral out of control when Maggie becomes involved in a tug-of-war, targeted by various hit men and syndicates all interested in getting a piece of Colton’s action… and of his daughter.K.G. Stutts’s main character undergoes a dramatic change from a nave princess to a determined woman with the courage to fight overwhelming circumstances to attain freedom from a pre-arranged destiny she wants no part of.  Treated as an object or property by everyone she knows, including her own father, Maggie is forced to grow up quickly if she is to cope with, even survive, the unwanted attentions of the men in her father’s profession.The transformation of Maggie is a gradual one which also slowly begins to affect her two suitors, Dean Lawrence and Eric Cooper.  Through her, both men are presented with a rare opportunity to reform their characters.  Dean is presented originally as a brutal, bad-tempered thug with only one thing on his mind, and he makes no excuses to her for the type of person he is.  It’s his time spent with Maggie that slowly wears away at his resolve, reawakening the basic humanity in his heart he had long thought dormant from the demands of his job.  It’s no surprise that he should be drawn to Maggie, the epitome of beauty and purity; as opposites, they not only attract, but they balance each other out.In contrast to Dean, Eric Cooper puts up a faade trying to convince Maggie that he is a good person from the beginning, while eventually he’s unveiled as a weak-willed coward who is afraid to fight for what’s important in life.  His attachment to Maggie builds up to a three-fold change, from a false noble front to the indifference and blind obedience of a henchman and finally to a genuinely heroic soul trying to find his own path and something worth fighting for.The pacing of the story is handled with precision, the structure divided into chapters with distinctive titles, similar to separate episodes of an ongoing TV series with an overarching plot, with the overall effect one of fulfillment and satisfaction upon completing the book to its end.A throwback to the days of serial dramas and chapter plays, CHANGE THE STARS is a brisk tale of mob violence and corruption, true love and sexual lust, and one woman’s reclamation of her individuality.