The City of Stardust - Georgia Summers - ★★

AUTHOR: Georgia Summers

GENRE: Portal Fantasy

PUBLICATION DATE: January 30, 2024

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: A dark portal fantasy with a magical but dangerous underworld. Amazing potential, average execution. The first half was still okay but the second half went haywire.

Plot Preview:

All young Violet Everly knows is that her mother Marianne left when she was two, and her maternal uncles Ambrose and Gabriel have taken care of her ever since. Only fourteen years later does she learn the truth. The Everly family has been cursed since centuries, and in every generation, the best and brightest Everly is taken away by a woman named Penelope, about whom no one knows anything except that she doesn’t seem to age. Marianne left on a personal mission to break the curse, but hasn’t been heard of since. Violet is the last of the Everly line. So she will be the last to suffer, unless she can break the curse herself. Thus begins her quest that takes her across the globe, encountering many new people and facts. Along the way, she must deal with Penelope’s assistant Aleksander, though she isn’t sure if he can be trusted.

The story comes to us from the third-person perspectives of several characters.

Bookish Yays:

🔑 Penelope – one fascinating character who almost single-handedly holds the plot on her shoulders. Rare for an antagonist to steal the thunder so convincingly! Violet’s uncle Ambrose came a close second in the best characters list, but he doesn’t get the page space he deserves.

🔑 The writing is quite lyrical. Though this isn't strictly a yay for me because I prefer plot over prose, it still has its charm, especially when nothing much in the book is working better. I appreciate that the lyrical prose didn’t turn into purple prose any time.

🔑 The cover – stunning!

Bookish Mixed Bags:

🔐 Aleksander and the other characters, most of whom appear when convenient and disappear when convenient, and some even die when convenient. Hardly any character sounds sensible, and hardly any character arc reaches its full potential. This is especially disappointing because some of those characters, especially the unworldly ones, had fabulous potential.

🔐 The idea of the portal fantasy with its use of doors and keys is quite good but the actual penning of the thoughts needed much work. This concept was much better handled in books such as Alix E. Harrow’s ‘The Ten Thousand Doors of January’ and the Emily Wilde series by Heather Fawcett.

🔐 The connection between Violet and Aleksander is never at the forefront and doesn’t turn into a typical “romance”, which I appreciate. However, their chemistry is almost zero. I couldn’t figure out how the two came together when there was no proper foundation to their relationship.

🔐 The worldbuilding is somewhat half-baked. We get plenty of fancy names but hardly any visuals. What use is a fantasy world if we cannot picture it properly in our mind?

🔐 The story is character-oriented, so we get third-person perspectives from many characters. TOO MANY CHARACTERS! The frequent character hopping gives us information from all sides, but also makes the flow jumpy.

Bookish Nays:

🚪 Violet didn’t appeal much to me. I get that she was quite young and hence impulsive and headstrong. However, her success at travelling the world and discovering various clues on the first attempt almost every time feels too unconvincing, especially considering how she lived a sheltered life even until her late teens. Moreover, her character doesn’t show much growth over the course of the book. It would have been nice to see some deeper failures on her journey leading to maturity.

🚪 Officially, this is a dark fantasy, and it does get very dark. However, the flattish character development and the impulsive nature of the protagonist generates YA/NA feels. (And as you might know, I am not a fan of YA/NA writing.)

🚪 The ending is utterly disappointing! There are blatant hints almost throughout the book about what the key factor at the climax might be, but I hoped that the execution would be more satisfying. What a lacklustre resolution of the major conflict!

🚪 There are too many important things left unexplained. But the most annoying is Marianne’s track. After all that buildup about Violet’s mom and her long solo quest to break the curse, the book doesn’t offer any closure about her fate. So annoying!

🚪 There are some gruesome scenes, which might be okay for some readers but not my cup of tea. I never enjoy cannibalistic depictions.

🚪 As the book was character-oriented, I was prepared for the slower pace in the first half, but the second half was just tedious and repetitive.

🚪 I hate it when I know more than characters because my impatience then gets the better of me and I keep waiting for them to catch up to ‘current events.’ The reader awareness is a result of the ubiquitous third person perspective from a whole load of characters instead of sticking to a core 2-3 viewpoints. Everyone except the reader has just limited information. It should be the other way around – sheesh!

All in all, this debut fantasy novel had some positives, but the overall execution was a dampener. Many readers keep comparing this (not in a good way) with ‘The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue’, but I’ve not read it yet, so no idea and no comparison.

To be fair, I did like the first half to a great extent. If the entire book had matched that level, I might have even given this a rating between 3.5 and 4. But the slow second half and the hazy finale just messed everything up.

If you value good writing over a good plot or character building or world building in a dark fantasy setting , this might work better with you.

My thanks to Hodder & Stoughton and Hodderscape for providing the DRC of “The City of Stardust” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.