There’s been a spat of ironborn deaths in the news recently, and when Arlo witnesses one in a cafe, she crosses paths with Nausicaa (not of the valley of the wind) who is also there at the time. She’s an 18 year old ironborn, or half-fae, with not enough magic to really be considered a member of the royal family she’s related to. Spoilers are quite fine for the book though- the book spoils itself the vast majority of the time, and is one of the reasons it’s just an annoying read.Īrlo is our mainest of the POV characters. PlotĪs with most brand new releases, I won’t be covering the entire plot summary, but there will be spoilers when I get nitpicky. It’s nice to see genuine excitement for the world of the fae, but I can’t recommend such a somehow boring tome, you know? There’s not even a lot of funny jokes I can make here, except the part where I’m going to point out racism, and that’s not funny really, it’s just sad.

Much of the plot, too, is driven by sudden convenience and random encounters, leading to an ending that feels like it has not built to anything at all and with nothing satisfying having happened besides a kiss. POV characters don’t meet up until more than halfway through the 500 page tome, and half of them are simply uninteresting. It’s too long, too meandering, with excessive information dumping throughout the story and genuinely was a slog to read through until the last 50 pages. There’s plenty of fine things born from that passion, to some kinda funny jokes and interesting ideas, but Dark Hollow Star suffers everywhere else. It is apparent the author cares about lgbt+ characters considering there’s no straight people. It is apparent this book cares a lot for its characters and world, their quips and the lore upon lore upon added lore the reader is given. To an unsettling meta degree in fact, when abruptly near the end of the book the main character literally gets a magical d20. A Dark and Hollow Star, cursed be that stupidly generic YA title, falls heavily into the latter example despite it being an urban fantasy fae book. The kind of book that feels more like someone’s OCs on their tumblr art blog, or their DND campaign party. One of the hardest kinds of books for me to review is the earnest kind, the modern book that I can so easily see myself in another timeline being way too into. I’m turning in this review of an ARC on the final day, because I had to hold myself hostage to finish my reading today or it’d never get done. And here I thought I’d be reading a fun book I’d like to get out of my reading slump.

A dark and hollow star book 2