The Starlight Heir by Amalie Howard

TL;DR: Quite a disappointment.
Source: Netgalley – Thanks you to the publisher!

Plot: Randomly chosen women are made to compete for a prince’s hand in marriage, and it gets spicy.
Characters: Honestly, no thank you. I didn’t enjoy them at all.
Setting: We got the flavor of our inspiration here, but it was lost entirely to the modern slang and plot that hurtled forward with little to no explanation.
Magic: Again, little to nothing as far as explanation goes.

Thoughts:

I had hopes that this with it’s beautiful cover and fantastic inspiration source would be a winning Romantasy to start out the year on but sadly that’s not the case. This was pitched as a Persian/Indian inspired romantasy with a competition. My problems started very early as the writing felt very young on this, very young. I could look past that and easily slide into a young adult read however but in the first few chapters lines like ‘Thick thighs save lives’ are dropped which is not appropriate at all to the setting. We get more later on such as ‘resting bitch face’ and ‘princesplaining’ which truly felt awkward and out of place for our setting and story.

The overall pace of the story didn’t work for me either. We meet our main character who has a fantastic and spicy best friend. But once she abruptly arrives in the palace all the women except one mysterious one begin to hate her and she the competitions begin. I actively hate the idea of women against women in these books, and this one really amped that up. We also have the mysterious second prince. Compounded with the young writing style and very spicy scenes we see very early this felt disjointed and a bit of a mess. I wish we’d gotten so much more explanation on so much of this story. Things and statements were dropped and just left to dangle with nothing added. It was unfortunate.

This wasn’t for me sadly but we’ll move on. If you really want to give this one a try just go in aware of the very modern slang and writing, along with the focus on the spice which seems to jump out of nowhere at times. 2 out of 5 for me, I can’t recommend this one.