A Crown of Stars

 

Kensington Books

ISBN: 9781496751362

ON SALE: 02/24/2026

Available now for preorder

​

​​

​​​PROLOGUE

​

JULY, 1917

THE HUDSON RIVER, NEW YORK

 

The water was gray and thick, and the wind that skimmed it tasted of summer. What might have been a thousand panicked voices, but was actually only hundreds, screamed in an eerie sort of harmony: bass, treble, soprano. Lifting and falling. All around Rita Jolivet, frantic people swam or sank in the river, scattered along its bright surface.

 

She wasn’t frantic, not yet, but her arms were tired, and her legs were tired, and the water closed over her head. The voices were snuffed. She heard only the pulse of the river in her eardrums then, stronger than even her own heartbeat.

 

She kicked back to the surface, hands finding the air first, then her head and arms. Her long skirts billowed behind her, tangling in her legs; her corset cinched every breath.

 

It was a messy way to die. An inelegant, undignified way.

 

The water swallowed her down again. She held her breath and closed her eyes, battling the weight of her dress, the tug of the current that whispered Yes, come with me, deeper.

 

Deeper.

 

She opened her eyes and found the sun overhead, a silvery pale glimmer that shifted and danced. A darker shadow just beside it, steadier, almond-shaped. A lifeboat.

 

She mustered her energy, fought her way up again. This time when she broke free, she took a deep, whooping breath. The lifeboat was overturned but still floating, so Rita—who had been raised alongside a river, in fact, a wide strong one with its own whispering currents, and so knew very well how to swim—sliced her way to it, gray water, white froth.

 

Her fingers dug into the ridges of the planking, and the boat gave an alarming tilt, but then a man with a walrus moustache grabbed hold of the prow, and the tilt leveled out.

 

The screaming wound on. Even the seagulls, gliding in their white-and-black lines, joined in.

 

Rita hitched her way higher up the boat. She met the man’s eyes, lifted her chin, and managed a smile, a brave one, a beautiful one. One that would, eventually, make its way around the world in posters and promotional stills and postcards, and inspire thousands of women (in their more intimate moments) to arrange their hair in just the way hers looked right now, freed from its pins, swept dark and dramatic across her pale brow, dampened curls clinging sensually to her cheekbones and shoulders and back.

 

A man yelled, “Cut!”

 

Instantly, the screaming stopped. The people who had been drowning seconds before now only treaded in place, every face turned toward a nearby skiff holding a trio of dry, well-dressed men, one with a megaphone dangling from his fingers. Beyond them, at the edge of the shore, a tall wooden platform loomed over them all, loaded with more men and a moving-picture camera on a tripod.

 

Rita slipped off the lifeboat, swam the short distance to the skiff. She was plucked from the water and wrapped at once in a blanket, a tin mug of whiskey pressed into her hands.

 

Léonce Perret, director of Lest We Forget, Rita’s film child, her dream child, her nightmare, sank into a squat beside her. The skiff rocked; water smacked against the hull. Although the humans had fallen quiet, the gulls had not, still cawing and cackling. Somewhere in the distance, a ship’s bell clanged three metallic, minor notes.

 

Léonce ran a palm down his cheek. He gave her a sideways look, the oiled part in his hair gleaming under the sun.

 

“What do you think, love?” he asked. “Cinéma vérité enough for you?”

 

Rita clutched the blanket tighter around her. Over two hundred extras bobbing in the Hudson stared back at her, at her director, waiting for the signal for the next take.

 

She lifted the mug, her hand shaking. She downed the whiskey and cleared her throat.

 

“It’s close,” she said finally, flat. “Not as cold, not as many people, but close. And everyone here’s still alive. So that’s goddamned different, I guess.”

​​

​​***

​

Excerpted from A Crown of Stars by Shana Abé. Copyright © 2026 by Five Rabbits, Inc. Excerpted by permission of Kensington Books, a division of Kensington Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing by the publisher.

​