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explodingsilver · 5 months

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Book review: Nightbane by Alex Aster

Lightlark…2!

I’ve already made my thoughts on the first book quite clear (read that review first if you haven’t already; I don’t feel like rehashing all the context), and were I a bit more sensible, I would have stayed away from its sequel. I am, however, somewhat of a literary masochist, so of course I borrowed this from Hoopla the day it was released (November 7th, not too long ago). Very pleased that I was able to write this review much faster than the first one, though this review is shorter, at only 2,100 words long. Was the experience worth it? I don’t know, you tell me.

(There are spoilers ahead, on the off chance that you care)

The plot and style

After the events of the first book, Isla is trying to learn her several powers as well as get a hold of this “leading two different realms” thing while trying to move on from getting betrayed by four different people she used to love. At a celebration for a Wildling holiday (in which no Wildlings other than herself are in attendance), Grim magically crashes the party from afar and announces that the Nightshade army will destroy Lightlark in thirty days. The other realms start preparing for the invasion, and Isla tries to recover all her lost memories of being with Grim in hope that they will reveal what his goal is and how to stop him, especially after receiving a prophetic vision of him standing in the ruins of a village he destroyed with his powers.

Put simply, if the plot of the first book is split between “Isla and Celeste search for a MacGuffin” and “Isla and Oro search for a different MacGuffin”, this book is split between “Isla and Oro do basic defense building stuff” and “Isla remembers the time she and Grim searched for a third MacGuffin”. There’s also a subplot about a rebel group trying to capture Isla, but this is inconsequential and could’ve been dropped entirely.

It feels like there was an attempt to address some of the criticism of the first book, but not nearly enough of an attempt. On the one hand, metaphor usage has improved to the point where it actually feels like it was written by a human being and not a neural network (no throbbing and raw glaciers this time around), the book acknowledges that no longer having a power no one else had in the first place is less bad than having a maximum lifespan of 25, and Isla realizes that Grim let her win the duel in the first book and that she did not win against a 500+ year old army general on the strength of her own skill. On the other hand, it does not address questions like “how does Starling society even function if none of them ever live to 26?” or “if Oro always knows when someone is lying, why didn’t he call bullshit the moment Celeste said ‘Hi, my name is Celeste’?”

Speaking of that last thing: I didn’t mention it in my review of the first book because it didn’t really feel relevant to anything, but each ruler has a ‘flair’, a special power that is unique to them. Oro’s is that he can always tell when someone is lying. Grim’s is that he can teleport. This book reveals that Isla’s is that she is immune to curses. Glad to finally have an answer to one of my biggest questions of the first book (checks notes) 75% of the way through the second one, when this explanation should’ve been given the moment we learned the original stated reason does not apply.

Wildling elixir and its (lack of) consequences

Much of this book centers around the presence of the Wildling elixir from the first book, a potion that is super effective at healing wounds. As you might imagine, this kills a lot of the tension. Used in conjunction with Isla’s magical teleportation device, “teleport away, use Wildling elixir, teleport back” becomes an easy way to recover when the characters get their flesh ripped apart. And indeed, they do this all the time! The book tries to nerf this strategy by stating that the elixir is rare due to the flower used to make it being rare, but 1) this is at odds with Isla’s very liberal use of it, and 2) aren’t the Wildlings the “make flowers grow instantly” people? Why can’t they just use those powers on it like they do for every other plant?

There was a bit of potential for an interesting theme with these flowers: Isla eventually learns that while the Wildlings use them to make the healing elixir, the Nightshades use those exact same flowers to make the titular nightbane, which is basically fantasy heroin. I was intrigued by this motif (I like it when things have a dual nature like that), but unfortunately this doesn’t really go anywhere, other than some vague gesturing at “wow, just like Isla”. Speaking of Isla…

Isla

This time around, Isla is clearly traumatized by the events of the last book, trusts very few people, and is aware that she is in over her head with leading two realms full of subjects she barely knows while also being the king’s unofficial consort. Not a bad start for a character arc, but in effect, she has gone from naive and impulsive to naive, impulsive, and guilty about those things while making little effort to amend them. It feels like her attitude towards leadership is basically “I’m allowed to call myself a bad leader but nobody is allowed to agree with me on that.”

Much of Isla’s internal conflict in this book is based around her Nightshade heritage on her father's side. She is convinced that there is an inherently evil part of her because her father was from the Inherently Evil Realm. This may not come as a surprise, but I do not like when stories have such a thing as an Inherently Evil Realm. Not only does Nightshade fill this role, but the book never even gestures at pushing back against Isla’s conviction that her heritage taints her, and in fact ends up affirming it.

This book really told me to my face that Isla is the first person in millennia to have both Wildling and Nightshade powers. I do not buy that even for a moment. Maybe my disbelief is because the series discarded the “only one realm’s power set per person, even if their parents are from different realms” thing in the same book it was introduced, and I would expect there to be Wildling/Nightshade couples way more often than once per few millennia. But no, that highly plausible thing can’t happen because then Isla won’t be the most special person currently alive!

The other characters

Sadly, the rest of the cast did not improve, and in some instances, got worse.

Oro going from "world weary, distant king" to "official love interest" has unfortunately sanded down all his interesting aspects, and everything I liked about his character in the first book now takes a backseat to being overly protective of Isla and making stock Love Interests threats to kill anyone who hurts her. I swear, he turned so generic that some of his lines were indistinguishable from something Grim would say. But hey, if nothing else, he at least didn’t get character assassinated like I was sure he would!

While Grim actually does stuff in this book, he still has no personality traits other than what's included in the Sexy Villain Starter Pack. Like, it actually upsets me that he's such an absolute nothing of a character. Everything about him begins and ends with “what if the villain…was sexy?”, and there are about a morbillion stories out there that provide more interesting answers to this question. You’d think focusing on him this much would be the perfect opportunity to give him any unique traits at all, but Aster certainly did not take that opportunity, nor did she ever answer the question of why he likes Isla, despite the sheer number of pages dedicated to their relationship.

As for everyone else? Azul, our beloved token gay black man who runs his realm like a democracy, still receives woefully little page time. Cleo, the bitchy ruler who hates Isla for no reason, receives even less, but at least we get to hear about her dead son, I guess. Ella, Isla's Starling assistant, is mentioned so rarely I wonder if Aster forgot she exists. There are also several new average citizen characters introduced, but none of them are remotely interesting. They're all defined solely by whether or not they're on Isla's side. It says something when the best new character is Isla's new animal companion (a panther named Lynx, who rules because he does not give a shit about Isla).

The chili pepper emoji, as the TikTokers call it

Because I must do as the book did and address the topic of sex before I get to the final important bits.

This book is much hornier than the first one, but in a way that makes large parts of it feel like one of those dreams where you're trying to have sex with someone but your attempts keep getting interrupted. I regret that I did not count the number of times Isla was about to fuck someone and then got denied for some reason or another.

There are three times she actually succeeds, and luckily these scenes do not read like they were written by Sarah J. Maas, despite her obvious influence on everything else. This doesn't seem like much of a compliment, but this series needs all the W’s it can get. That's not to say everything is fine, though. There's one scene that's obviously using all the "first time" stuff for characterization, and I can't help but feel this would be more effective had they not already slept together a few short chapters beforehand? Like c’mon, all you had to do was switch the order of those two scenes.

The ending

Shortly before the Nightshade army is set to storm the island and destroy it, Isla learns Grim’s (and Cleo’s) real motivation for doing so: there’s a portal on the island leading to another world, one in which the original founders of Lightlark came from before making Lightlark in the image of the world they left. Grim and Cleo want to open that portal and reach the other world, which will just so happen to destroy the island. They’re not actually trying to kill everyone for the evulz. Isla, in her naivety, accidentally opens it for them before they even arrive.

During the final battle, while trying to steal Grim's powers so she can kill him and save Lightlark, Isla finally remembers the last two important memories: 1) she and Grim actually got married right before he memory-wiped her, and 2) what she thought was a prophetic vision of him killing an entire village was actually a memory of her doing so. Convinced that she'll accidentally kill Oro if she stays with him, she agrees to go with Grim, whom she just realized she is still in love with, in exchange for a promise that he'll withdraw the attack.

I cannot remember the last time I had this strong of an "are you fucking kidding me" reaction to the end of a book. But after some thinking, I decided that it actually makes for some great tragedy material. “Traumatized woman with a supportive partner becomes convinced that she’s too horrible to be with him and goes back to her terrible husband” would make for a good story if this was a more grounded book written by anyone else. Alas, this concept just had to be tackled here.

I also naively thought that because the deal was for two books, that means this would be a duology. But it feels like there will be a third book, and I'm hoping there is, not out of any desire for more (unsure how much more I can take), but because it would be straight-up authorial malpractice to end the series on that note.

Conclusion

This honestly wasn’t quite as bad as the first book, but the problems that persisted outweighed the ones that got fixed, and the severe case of Middle Book Syndrome certainly did not help its case. It’s a very small improvement stylistically, but when the nicest things I can say about it are “there were some concepts that could’ve made for an interesting story in the hands of a better author” and “the sex scenes aren’t atrocious” and “the cat is kinda cool”, then I feel justified in calling it terrible overall. It’s a good thing that Lightlark…3! is presumably a long ways away, because I will need all that time to recover from having read this.

#nightbane #lightlark #alex aster #ya fantasy #book review #book discussion #original content do not steal

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belle-keys · 2 years

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In today's book community drama...

So basically, people found out that the author of that new book Lightlark aka Alex Aster is from an incredibly wealthy family: her twin sister (look up the Pierson twins, they're pretty well known) is worth over 200 million dollars because she's an entrepreneur (or something, idk) and she has a company with Selena Gomez, and their parents are also incredibly rich (Jacksonville royalty? idk). I believe she's also friends with Addison Rae (idk who this is but I saw people on Twitter pointing this out).

So, she got a seven-figure deal for Lightlark out of nowhere really and the book also got a movie deal from Universal and the producers are gonna be the people who produced Twilight... but the book is also not even released yet.

Then when readers were discussing whether or not she's an industry plant on TikTok, she wrote a whole ass essay in the comments about why she's "fortunate but has zero connections whatsoever". The book also got blurbed by a ton of big authors, including Chloe Gong and Victoria Aveyard, the latter ardently defending her. I believe she also had a dealership with Toyota at one point, as well as a brief TikTok music career. See, within the last few months the book has been trending a shit ton on booktok because she's got a big following and is kinda pitching her publishing story as a kind of "rags to riches" situation.

I also heard the book is Not Well Written because it reads like an acotar-hunger games fanfiction.

#and that's all for today folks #drop your opinions #books #ya books #publishing industry #publishing #booktok #alex aster #lightlark #chloe gong #victoria aveyard #book blog #new books #fantasy books #nepotism #bookish

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pumpkinblossoms · 2 years

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this Alex Aster shit makes me want to leave both the Internet and the book industry behind forever. Not to be a sappy shit, but writing for teenagers is a privilege and getting your book onto shelves is a breathtaking honor and the fact that this privilege and this honor almost unilaterally goes to smug white rich girls with a follower count is just...a little too much for me today

#yeah I know it's been this way for ages #but tik tok has literally literally rotted the world of publishing from the inside out #it's fucking depressing #lightlark #alex aster

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lesbocrocker · 1 year

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Someone needs to tell Alex Aster that a character actually needs to figure in the story to be considered good representation.

#this post is about azul and cleo #lightlark #anti lightlark #alex aster

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joemerl · 9 months

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"So when Terry Pratchett writes this he's a 'comic genius,' but when I, Alex Aster—"

#Discworld #Guards! Guards!#Terry Pratchett #Lightlark #Alex Aster

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bookaddict24-7 · 6 months

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New Young Adult Releases Coming Out Today! (November 7th, 2023)

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Have I missed any new Young Adult releases? Have you added any of these books to your TBR? Let me know!

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New Standalones/First in a Series:

Artifice by Sharon Cameron

Check & Mate by Ali Hazelwood

With or Without You by Eric Smith

Swarm by Jennifer D. Lyle

Last Girl Breathing by Court Stevens

The Revenge Game by Jordyn Taylor

No One Left But You by Tash McAdam

Gorgeous Gruesome Faces by Linda Cheng

Wren Martin Ruins It All by Amanda DeWitt

Finding My Elf by David Valdes

Emmett by L.C. Rosen

Where He Can't Find You by Darcy Coates

New Sequels:

Vengeance of the Pirate Queen (Daughter of the Pirate King #3) by Tricia Levenseller

Nightbane (Lightlark #2) by Alex Aster

The Way I Am Now (The Way I Used to Be #2) by Amber Smith

Loveboat Forever (Loveboat, Taipei #3) by Abigail Hing Wen

Dawnbreaker (Salvation Cycle #2) by Jodi Meadows

The Hunting Moon (The Luminaries #2) by Susan Dennard

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Happy reading!

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crow-caller · 5 months

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TOMORROW, DECEMBER 9TH, 6.30 GMT: LIGHTLARK 2 AKA NIGHTBANE VID!!

Mark out your calendars for 3 hours and try to make the live premiere if you can! It's been a lot of fun live reacting with chat. (My text version on my blog CrowDefeatsBooks will go up at the same time btw)

SEDUCTIVE HAUNTS

#lightlark #nightbane #youtube #yewchube #:3 #alex aster #Youtube

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angel-maybe-alive · 1 year

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So I was reading lightlark and also looking trough the Tumblr tag and I came upon this thing

This excerpt it's a description of Isla's crown armor for the duel with the other rulers

And first of all this is exactly what is described that she a powerless barely twenty girl wore to fight hundreds of years older former warlords and kings who had powers

So I had to draw this

There are many things to hate about this, first and foremost this is described as the lingerie armor usually found in male gaze RPGs

But also no coverage on the head or neck

She doesn't describe any type of hand coverage or gauntlet so either she went to fight bare hands or the most disgusting idea I can ever imagine, chainmail gloves

I was generous about this by the way because the objective was clearly to be extremely sexy so I added some flowery stuff to it because just the armor itself looks like the least appealing design I can ever imagine

Also the boots I hope the author imagined them movable and not the most uncomfortable ever ariana grande style of boots

And the author doesn't describes what she is wearing under so I'm just imagining the pinching

And i have to say again this was the thing she wore at a duel with highly powerful beings also while trusting the dude that everyone thought it was evil

If grim or any of them wanted to end that fuckery fast her head would've been rolling in seconds

#i had to do this #lightlark #alex aster #isla crown #this thing caused me phisical pain #and i was nice because she described a pauldron as a shoulder pad #i could've given her a literal 80s shoulderpad #anti booktok #fuck booktok #anti booktok bitch #booktok

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thebookstan · 3 months

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O medo só era amenizado por sua curiosidade. Ela sempre desejou mais de... tudo. Mais experiências, mais lugares, mais pessoas.

— Lightlark

#alex aster #quotes #trecho de livro #bookstan #citações

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explodingsilver · 1 year

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Book review: Lightlark by Alex Aster

Back in January, I was in the mood to read a bad book, and Hoopla just so happens to have this one. You may remember hearing about it last year; it’s most famous for being 1) heavily advertised on TikTok, and 2) very poorly written. Turns out that second point is no joke. But it’s not just bad, it’s the specific flavor of bad that compels innocent bloggers on tumblr.edu to write 3,000 word reviews that don’t even exhaust every problem they had with the book. Such as myself, for example.

(This won’t be as long or as thorough as @crow-caller‘s definitive review, but it’s still the longest post I’ve ever written.)

The writing style

I’ve said it before, but the best way I can describe the writing style of this book is that it reads like it was written by a neural network that was trained entirely on Throne of Glass clones. Aster clearly knows what words she needs to use to make it fit the YA style, but she does not stop to consider whether the resulting sentence actually coheres. One of the more egregious examples:

Oro's betrayal was a glacier in her chest, throbbing and raw.

Are ‘throbbing’ and ‘raw’ really words that people use to describe glaciers? Because if so, that’s news to me.

But it’s not just the individual sentences that feel slightly off and more than a little bit auto-generated, it’s the whole damn plot. The sentences are merely a scaled-down version of this book’s uncanny feeling, like some strange literary version of Pumpelly’s rule. The actual plot is constructed with that same strategy of throwing the most popular components of YA fiction into one story with no thought given as to how they actually fit together. The protagonist, Isla Crown, is incredibly sheltered but also a fierce warrior, the plot revolves around an infamous fight-to-the-death where no one has actually died, there’s the two 500+ year old love interests, a rival woman whose main personality trait is hating the protagonist...

This is much more of a tangential problem, but I also suspect that the book would be about 3/4 of its current length if you just removed the unnecessary paragraph breaks. I can’t recall having that complaint about any other book I’ve read.

Lightlark and the Centennial

The whole conceit is that the titular island of Lightlark is surrounded by a storm that only lets up every 100 years, so the leaders of the six realms meet up during that brief window in order to try and break the curses on their realms. With a concept like that, you’d think that Lightlark is a vast wilderness with maybe a village of hardy recluses here and there, but no, it’s an absolute bustling city, practically the capital of the world. (As an aside, it’s hinted that the world does contain more than just the six realms, but the book is really bad at making this feel true.)

Let me preface my description of the Centennial with a disclaimer: I dislike it when a book’s magic system justifies the existence of hereditary monarchy. Obviously, a book’s magic system necessitating the existence of hereditary monarchy endears it to me even less. Well, guess what this book does! The prophecy they are following in order to break the curse says that a ruling line must come to an end, so none of these rulers have heirs. But in this world, a realm’s magic is stored in its royal family, being passed from parent to child, and if the line dies out, the whole realm will go extinct. Sad news for the guillotine fandom.

The Centennial is an infamously deadly affair, because in order for the prophecy to be fulfilled, someone has to die. Here’s the thing: this is the fifth Centennial, and all the realms are still around, meaning that no one has ever died at this notoriously fatal event. They’re not even allowed to try to kill each other until the halfway point, with the first half just being various demonstrations that are subject to the whims of the rulers who come up with them. Later this is explained by saying that it’s really tough to choose which realm has to die so the others can live, which fair enough, but still doesn’t explain the reputation.

Now, while everyone else tries to do their own thing, Isla and her best friend Celeste (the ruler of Starling) secretly try to find this fabled artifact called the Bondbreaker, which can break the curses, but requires enough blood to kill a person to activate. Their plan is to split the blood cost between them, and this should break the curses on their realms but not the others. Why Isla never suggests that all six look for it and split the blood cost six ways and break the curse for everyone is beyond me.

The realms and the curses

So first off, the six realms that are actually competing are named Wildling, Sunling, Moonling, Starling, Skyling, and Nightshade. I’m going to be real with you: I don’t like those names. The fact that five of them are [Noun]ling makes them feel like placeholders that Aster forgot to change before submitting the draft to a publisher, and ‘Starling’ and ‘Nightshade’ are already words with definitions that are never acknowledged by the book.

The curses are also strangely incongruent. Starlings all die at the age of 25, while Skylings can’t fly, something that no one else was able to do in the first place and so really doesn’t make me feel bad for them. The Wildlings, meanwhile, get hit with a double curse: they must kill whoever they fall in love with and they have to eat a human heart once a month!

Yeah, let’s talk about the Wildlings, shall we? Given that our protagonist is one, we end up learning a lot about them.

The Wildlings are, we’re told, a society of fierce Amazonian temptress warriors. They seem to be matriarchal, though this isn’t really explored in-depth. It’s also stated that they’re at risk of going extinct because of the curse that requires them to kill whoever they fall in love with. Now hold up: why would the society infamous for producing seductresses stick to monogamy so fiercely as to pose an extinction risk? You’d think a society like that would opt for a more “conceive via one-night stands and raise the child communally” approach or something similar, especially since this has been a problem for 500 years, but that would require Aster to think through the implications of her own worldbuilding.

Now you might be thinking “hey, maybe the extinction risk is because of the whole needing to eat human hearts thing”, and yeah, you might think. But that particular aspect of the curse is explored so little that I began to get the feeling that it only exists as an excuse for the Bad Boy Love Interest to give Isla the nickname ‘Hearteater’ (but more on him later).

(As a side note, the combination of the heart eating thing and them having nature powers made me realize that I would like them more if they were straight-up Bosmer with the serial numbers filed off, but that’s just my preference.)

Isla is notable in that, due to her parents falling in love without killing each other, she is not affected by the curses, but also has no powers. Given that the Centennial involves demonstrating her powers, she has to find ways to either fake it or distract everyone by doing something else. This is one of the few things I actually liked about the book, and also something that will be important to remember for later.

Isla’s abilities

Back when I read Throne of Glass, my biggest complaint with it was that it keeps hyping up Celaena as the most feared assassin in the land, yet she spends most of her screentime doing things like playing the piano and trying on pretty dresses. This book has the opposite problem: we’re constantly told that Isla is incredibly sheltered due to her guardians trying to hide her lack of powers, yet she is easily able to do things like beat two different 500+ year old guys (who have commanded armies!) in one-on-one combat. This is explained as her having been trained all her life by one of her guardians, but I still don’t think that accounts for her being strong enough to do that.

And speaking of things her guardians taught her: her guardians’ plan is for Isla to seduce the king of Lightlark, a notoriously cold and reclusive man, because in this universe, if someone falls in love with you, you get access to their powers, and since he has the power of four different realms, Isla would finally get actual powers. Do they ever test her to see if she can seduce anyone at all before sending her off to do this? No. They seem to be under the impression that packing a bunch of revealing dresses will be enough to do the trick.

Isla refuses to go along with this plan for reasons that amount to “I’m not a slut, I’m a good girl who wants True Love”. So of course, she gets herself into a love triangle.

The love interests

Because is it truly a bad YA book if the protagonist doesn’t have to choose between Boy Next Door and Badboy McHunky? (Good YA authors realize that this actually isn’t a necessary component.) As mentioned earlier, they’re both over 500 years old.

Badboy McHunky is Grimshaw (nicknamed Grim), the ruler of Nightshade. Here’s the thing: I fundamentally get the appeal of dark and brooding bad boy love interests, moreso than most people in my general Tumblr cohort. Darkness is sexy by default. So keep that in mind when I say that this guy did nothing for me. His only personality traits are being edgy and horny, and I say this as someone who generally considers those to be positive traits. And despite all the suggestive scenes and the book playing up their attraction to each other, I never figured out why he likes Isla in the first place.

He also just doesn’t really work as the bad boy that the book is trying to pass him off as. The book will do anything to sell him as a villain except for having him actually do anything evil on-screen. Even the reveal of the one genuinely bad thing he did makes him come across as less like a villain and more like some clueless schmuck who got played like a fiddle by the real villain.

Boy Next Door is Oro, the king of Lightlark and ruler of Sunling. He’s the one that Isla has been tasked with seducing, and he’s developed a sort of cold detachment from everyone specifically to prevent himself from falling in love. Of course, things like “spending a lot of time with Isla and at one point carrying her while flying Superman-style” don’t exactly work in service of that caution.

As a side note, given that he’s portrayed as cynical and world-weary, I spent the whole book picturing him as a handsome but tired bearded man. Imagine my disappointment when I finally saw the official art of him that shows him as looking like Ken from one of the newer Barbie movies. If this were a movie, he’d be played by one of the Sprouse twins.

In the end, I really did get some satisfaction out of Grim realizing that he can’t use Isla’s powers because she doesn’t love him anymore, while Oro can. But I get the impression that my reaction was supposed to be “serves him right”, and instead it was “oh thank fuck, she’s going to end up with the guy that she has the bare minimum amount of chemistry with”.

The plot twist(s)

Remember how earlier, I said that Isla’s lack of powers was one of the few things I truly liked about this book? Yeah, I use the past tense “liked” for a reason. Because not only is it revealed that she did in fact have Wildling powers the entire time, but her father was a Nightshade, and therefore she also has Nightshade powers! And the only reason she thought she was mundane is because her Nightshade powers were masking her Wildling powers! So not only does the best thing about the book not actually apply in the end, it doubly does not apply! It’s important to note that earlier, Oro told Isla that if a child is born to parents from different realms, the child only gets one realm’s power. I also don’t remember if the book ever addresses why she’s not affected by the curses if she’s had powers the entire time.

But that’s not all! It turns out that Celeste is actually Aurora, the one who caused the curses and is therefore immune to them, and has used her shapeshifting ability to pretend to be every member of her own line of descendants for the past 500 years! I don’t even want to try to comprehend the logistics of doing that.

But that’s not all! It turns out that the Bondbreaker is actually the Bondmaker, and its purpose is to steal someone’s powers!

But that’s not all! It turns out that Isla and Grim were in a relationship prior to the events of the book, and he memory wiped her so that she’d go along with her guardians’ plan! When she gets angry about this, he immediately tells her that he really did believe that this was necessary, as Aurora convinced him it was.

So Isla abruptly falls out of love with Grim, uses the Bondmaker on Aurora to steal her powers, and then kills Aurora, bringing the Starling ruling line to an end and fulfilling the prophecy. But since Isla now has Aurora’s powers, the Starlings don’t drop dead, and since Isla and Oro are in love, Isla now has all six powers.

The wardrobes

I know, I’m also surprised that there’s enough to say about this aspect to warrant its own section in the review. But there’s several things that bothered me about the Isla’s outfits, and I am normally not a stickler for fashion in books.

Thing number one: there was a weird color coding system in place for the realms, where every realm is obligated to wear one specific color. And by weird I don’t mean “counterintuitive”, because the color choices made sense, but weird as in “why does this system even exist in the first place?” I can understand color coding the leaders during the Centennial, but everyone must abide by this system all the time. The only reason I can think of is so that everyone can tell at a glance what realm any given person is from, which is something that I cannot see being used for good, but the book never even attempts to address this. But there’s a catch: because nature contains a variety of colors, Isla and the other Wildlings can wear any color they want as long as it’s not already claimed by another realm! Isn’t she unique? Here’s the problem: Aster seems to have forgotten that this is also true of the sky. The joke here is almost too obvious to make.

Another thing that bothers me is the anachronism in her clothing. I do not mean this in a “this fantasy based on a specific era has characters wearing clothes that went out of fashion ten years beforehand”, I mean that this is a medieval fantasy setting and yet Isla wears a modern day bra. She also owns several tank tops, which are even referred to as such by the text. Sometimes her outfit descriptions, particularly ones where she’s just relaxing in her room, make it sound like she’s about to get sold to One Direction. But not all of it. Sometimes you get descriptions like this:

[The armor] had been fashioned into parts that accentuated her figure while also protecting it–metal shoulder pads, chain mail sleeves and tights, metal-plated boots that ran up to the top of her thigh, a sculpted breastplate.

This is the kind of passage that would get posted to r/menwritingwomen and get 10k upvotes, with one comment pointing out that a woman wrote it buried in the comments section with 4 points. Why does she need chain mail tights if her boots cover all of her legs? How does she even move in those boots? Doesn’t matter. The first priority is looking sexy, with practicality a distant second.

Miscellaneous points that didn’t quite fit into the other sections

I understand that the marketing for this book promised diversity? Well, the actual extent of it is that the token black guy is mourning over his dead husband.

Isla does not realize that Starlings can use their magic to forge weapons despite watching them do it right in front of everyone in a previous chapter

The necklace Grim gives her is described as a “diamond large as a small potato”, and I’m torn between thinking about how much her neck must hurt and making a “large boulder the size of a small boulder” joke

The book implies that Isla has some sort of spine pocket and refuses to elaborate on this

One thing I will say in this book’s favor is that at least the title does not follow the ‘X of Y and Z’ format. I know that’s damning with the absolute faintest praise, but I really can’t tell books with those titles apart anymore.

At one point, Isla sees the teeth of some wicked creatures who are trying to kill her and realizes with fright that their teeth are "tools to eat with". This woman is ~20 years old and has gone most of her life not knowing what teeth are for.

Conclusion

Honestly, this isn’t the worst book I’ve ever read, it’s merely the worst professionally published book I’ve ever read (not counting those where the publishing house exists solely for the sake of that book, à la Handbook for Mortals). Lightlark is to Maas-style fantasy what Divergent was to YA dystopia: bad in a specific, formulaic way that exposes the scaffolding of the genre for all to see. It hasn’t caused the immediate collapse of the genre, but ten years from now it will be commonly cited as the beginning of the end.

#lightlark #alex aster #book review #ya fantasy #book discussion #original content do not steal

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readinthedarkpod · 4 months

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2 Light 2 Lark: The Starstick Strikes Back… or something like that. That’s right baby, we’re back to cyberbullying Alex Aster except this time, we’ve dedicated an entire episode to it. Join us as we dissect Nightbane, the sequel to Lightlark.

Be aware: silences may be longer than they appear.

Join our book club @wornpagelibrary!

And if you want, follow the hosts @adxmparriish @figonas @laequiem and @hazelsheartsworn

#lightlark #nightbane #alex aster #booktok #book club #book club podcast #book podcast #podcast #bookblr #books #reading #Spotify

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arcadialedger · 1 year

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Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying Lightlark on an entertainment level. But gue description of our heroine cracks me up cause like

Oh gee, I wonder if Alex Aster is self inserting here.

#lightlark #alex aster #young adult #fantasy #ya #isla crown #the arcadia ledger

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cringefailbooknerd · 11 months

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I just read the Sunbearer Trials… and let me tell you. It might be my book of the year! And I’m going to say it… this book it what Alex Aster was trying to do with Lightlark and failing at. I know the two don’t connect but hear me out!

The Sunbearer Trials was fun, it incorporated a nice mix of Latino culture, and had a Hunger Games-like competition. Lightlark failed HARD at that, even though that’s what I was expecting from the book.

#the sunbearer trials #lightlark #alex aster #book review #the Sunbearer trials teo

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jimblejamblewritings · 1 year

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Rewriting Lightlark | part 1.

Summary: That's it. I literally just rewrote Lightlark and tried to make it better. Read if you want.

Grimshaw’s castle always had the lights on. Not a single corridor of the great stone fortress was without a lantern. It had taken Isla Crown forever to fall asleep and the sunlight streaming through the open windows woke her up after what felt like only minutes. She couldn’t even pull the comforter over her head to avoid the light — the fabric was translucent. Quietly, she sat up and stretched, trying not to disturb the sleeping body next to her.

Her brown bare feet took light steps across the floor, making flowers spring up through the grout between the stone tiles. The cold floor made her shudder. Isla paused and looked down before turning to see the flower trail behind her. She groaned internally — she knew she had kicked her socks off in the middle of the night. Instead of going back for the socks, she continued to the ensuite bathroom. The flowers could be dealt with later. Her bladder couldn’t.

The toilet, thankfully, made no noise as she flushed it. She figured she might as well brush her teeth while she was in the bathroom. Isla cleaned herself up quickly, wanting to get back to the warmth of the comforter. The small daisies continued springing up behind her as she left the bathroom. An undignified scream left her mouth when two hands reached for her. Isla turned to see nothing in the shadow of the bathroom door.

“Get out of there, Grimshaw, before you kill yourself.”

She held her hand out, waiting for something in the shadows to grab it. Grim’s white hand reached for her and he allowed himself to be pulled out of the shadows. Isla rolled her eyes as she led her boyfriend away from his own death. He was always doing that, ignoring his curse. All the realms of Lightlark were cursed. The people were forced to suffer all at the hands of the Grand Queen Aurora — a woman who relished in irony and cruel punishments.

But Grim never seemed to take it as seriously as he should have. He was a Nightshade and didn’t care that being in the dark for too long would literally kill him. He kept pushing the boundaries and lengths of time he could stay in the shadows, worrying Isla that one day he wouldn’t come back from them. Grim looked down at her, playing with the material of her silk nightgown.

“You know, it’s a good thing you are only half-Wildling,” he said with a mischievous smile. “I couldn’t handle my Hearteater being taller than me. It would severely bruise my ego, you know.”

Isla scoffed and gently pushed him. “Oh, please. Your ego disappeared the moment you met me.”

“Do you really think you have that much control over me?”

Isla blinked. Her mouth contorted into odd shapes as she tried to stop herself from laughing. A pansy began to bloom behind Grim’s right ear, touching the bottom of his ink black hair. He could bluff all he wanted but magic never lied. Love was a magic the people of Lightlark still didn’t quite understand.

They supposed it was because Lark Crown, their founder, nurtured the Heart of Lightlark. The Heart was a flower and the source of their magic. When Lark died, the Heart’s original form did too. The people thought it was because the plant was forever indebted to Lark’s love for it.

That was the only explanation they had for why falling in love with someone meant you were able to wield their powers. With Aurora’s curses, the wielding ability wasn’t as strong as it used to be. But it still appeared now and then, usually when the person in love was focused solely on their lover.

Isla picked the flower from behind his ear. “Grim, I want breakfast.”

He kissed her cheek and walked to his bedroom door. “I’m going to have to pick all these flowers out of the floor, you know.”

“Sorry.”

Isla clambered onto his side of the bed while Grim opened the door just enough to stick his head out of. She was only supposed to be on Night Isle when she held meetings with their king, not when she was sleeping in his bed. Grimshaw loved and trusted his people but he also knew how strong fear could be.

If the servants ever thought he and Isla were in a relationship, they would report it to Aurora out of fear of her killing them if she ever found out they had known about it. Children of two different isles weren’t allowed to be born. It made the curses weaker when the babies inherited both of their parents’ magic, turning imminent death into a minor inconvenience. Aurora killed those babies and publicly murdered their parents to discourage anyone from attempting another defiance.

It was a punishment Isla knew too well. Her mother was a Wildling. Her father was a Nightshade and the only person stupid enough to fall in love with a Wildling. If a Wildling loved someone, they were cursed to eat their heart. Maybe because he was a general in the army he wasn’t afraid of dying.

Her father, Ellisar, stayed in the shadows for as long as he could whenever her mother’s hunger took over. Isla heard stories from the servants about the few times that Alenia’s hunger wasn’t subdued but Ellisar had to leave the shadows or die. She almost caught him as he ran through the entirety of Wild Isle, able to smell him from miles away.

They lived well enough to have a proper family— Isla’s older brother was passed off as the son of a Wildling guard. But the happiness wasn’t forever. Alenia didn’t kill Ellisar. Aurora did. A Wildling doctor had told the Grand Queen what the entire isle managed to keep secret. Isla was grateful to all of the castle. They begged Aurora to take their lives instead of hers. Half the castle died for baby Isla’s life. As a child, she swore she would never put the castle through that again. So Grim was forever her secret.

He came back to the bed with a tray of food. The two were quiet as they ate. Isla closed her eyes in delight at the taste of eggy toast. It was made with sunbread. The Sunlings were the best bakers of Lightlark. Isla had tried to make her own bread for eggy toast but nothing ever tasted as good as sunbread. She finished her last bite of breakfast and snuggled back into Grim’s open arms. Her fingers trailed up down his arms covered by his long sleeve sleepshirt.

“I have to leave soon,” she muttered more to herself than to her boyfriend.

“You’ll be missing my celebration. It isn’t every day a man turns twenty.”

“Well, you’ll be missing my coronation.”

“Hmm, I believe birthdays are more important.” Grim hugged her tighter. “I am sorry about your brother.”

Talon Crown was more adventurer than ruler. He left Wild Isle only a couple of weeks before Aurora’s Decennial in hopes of finding a way to end the curses. Lightlark might have been abundant in magic but the newlands had a little bit of magic as well. But the storm grabbed Talon before his ship ever reached the other continents. The storm was another one of Aurora’s gifts to Lightlark. It surrounded all the islands and made trade or travel to the newlands a rather dangerous feat. Not everyone died but few made it back, including Talon.

“There’s nothing to be sorry about. Talon’s gone. We always knew it was a possibility. I’ve been training to be his heir ever since the day he took the throne.”

“But you’ve never trained for the Decennial.”

Isla kissed the corner of his mouth. “Let’s not talk about the Decennial. We still have three days and I must leave in an hour or two. I’d rather spend that time with you.”

Grimm peppered kisses all over her face. “Is that spending time with me dressed like this or with my shirt off?”

Instead of answering him, Isla pulled away from his grasp. Grim eagerly took off his shirt. When the white fabric no longer covered his eyes, he found Isla straddling his lap. The hands roamed up and down each other’s bodies as their lips touched. They kissed like they wouldn’t see each other tomorrow. The Decennial’s arrival made them desperate. The two of them realized how little time they might have left. At any moment in the tournament, one of them could die. Isla pulled back when Grim hissed.

“Did I bite you?”

He shook his head. “It was probably my fault, really. I got a bit too eager… You look beautiful.”

“You say that all the time.”

“I mean it.”

He began to kiss her jaw and down her neck. Isla threw her head back, eyes closed. She and Grim never really got the chance to savor each other. They were always quick, just to calm down their excitement, before having to leave to handle duties on their respective isles. Her eyes opened as she felt saliva fill her mouth. Isla swallowed it down.

“Grimshaw, wait.”

“Are you okay?” he asked as he pulled away eyes wide. “Hey, hey, it’s alright, Hearteater.”

Isla squeezed her eyes shut. Grim could see the teeth in her mouth that went from smooth to sharp. Part of the wildling curse. Being half-Nightshade, the curse wasn’t deadly but Isla still felt hunger whenever her excitement and passion became a bit too much. She snapped at the air before doubling over in pain as if she hadn’t eaten for weeks. Grim wormed himself out from under her, knowing she needed a moment without their bodies touching. Isla took in slow and deep breaths.

“Thank yo—” Her hand reached for Grim’s throat.

He watched the brown of her eyes turn completely black. Grim grabbed Isla’s other hand before it landed on his chest. He grunted in pain as her nails turned claws dug into his palm, drops of blood landing on the bed. The only thing between Isla’s snapping teeth and Grim’s face was his foot on her stomach. He tried to extend his leg to push her away but she wouldn’t budge. Wildlings gained a ridiculous amount of strength when hunting for a heart.

Isla breathed through her nose as she glared at Grimshaw, letting go of his throat. Before he could move, she bit his leg. The pain made him let go of her hand. Grim’s breathing became short and shallow as he found himself pinned. A silent scream left his mouth when Isla’s claws dug into his chest, trying to tear through the first layers of his body. Grim’s hand flailed as he tried to move just enough to reach the pillows shoved against the headboard. His fingers stretched until he felt the burning sensation of darkness. Grim grabbed the shadow and pulled himself into it.

Isla’s head shot up in confusion. She could smell her lover but she couldn’t find him. The pillows garnered her attention. She squinted. She was half Nightshade but never bothered to learn that magic properly, too fearful of upsetting Aurora. But some things still came naturally. She knew Grim was in the shadow of the pillow, hiding somewhere from her deep in the Shadow Realm. But she couldn’t reach into the shadow herself and grab him.

A growl of frustration erupted from her throat. Isla’s eyes went wide. She scrambled backwards until she hit the wooden footboard of the bed. Her hand covered her mouth as tears streamed down her face. She could feel the sharp teeth become normal again. Isla felt her chest tighten. She had never lost control before. Her head shot up when Grim slowly crept out of the shadows.

“No, Grim, stay away from me.”

“Isl—”

“I almost killed you… I almost killed you.”

“You didn’t.”

“Grimshaw.”

“I knew what loving you might bring,” he said, offering his hand.

Isla gently took it. “But I never thought it would bring this. I thought the curse was supposed to be mild.”

“When you think about it, it was. I felt the teeth and you were able to warn me. We both just didn’t take it seriously enough.”

Isla stared at the cut on his chest, inches from his heart. “That isn’t good enough… I… I’m not ready to accept it as easily as you.”

“What are you saying, Isla?”

She pulled his hand to her mouth and kissed it. “I’m saying I need time… Grim, I’m asking you t—”

“No.” Grim pulled his hand out of her grasp.

“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

“You want me to hide your memories of us in the shadows of your mind and make it like you’ve never met me. I won’t do it. I don’t want to end my relationship with you.”

“I don’t either. But I need time to think about how to be with you when the curse is stronger than I thought.”

“Then take all the time in the world but don’t end us.”

“You don’t understand. The Decennial is in a few days. I won’t be focused if I can only think about how I almost killed you.”

Grim clenched his teeth. He looked around his entire room before facing Isla again. There was truth to her words and they both knew it. Distraction could mean death. With a slow nod of his head, Grim let Isla lay her head down in his lap. His fingers gently rested on her forehead.

“Go to sleep, my Hearteater. You’ll be back on Wild Isle when you wake and it’ll be like we never met past a Realm Dinner. I’ll never forget you.”

“I’ll come back to you, Grim.”

Isla closed her eyes and let the shadows of her mind pull her into sleep.

#lightlark #alex aster #isla crown #grimshaw #booktok

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