Here, a year later, with its fame mostly forgotten, I welcome the ghast of Lightlark 2 back inside my body for the sake of entertainment. The probably isn't the fact that it's horny, but its horniness skates along in this weird limbo gray area because of its genre, offputting and unsatisfying. Worse, her fellow rulers haven't ceded victory quietly, and there are others in Isla's midst who don't believe her ascent to power was earned. oro will be referred to as either wonderbread or an old man or my personal favorite, “walking chastity belt,” or some combination of the three. Isla actually talks to average citizens in this book, but they're all single minded and one note it feels weird.

baby don't hurt me), Grim brings up the value of pain, and they both examine being a source of life and a destroyer of life, a simultaneous cure and poison. It's actually kinda crazy how many extreme acts of violence there are in this book, how many times the characters have sustained terrible injuries and are coated in blood and describing the pain, but with no lasting effects and as the reader you have no doubt on if they will survive or not. it was “isla went and did this,” “isla went over here and did that,” “isla is in love with him,” over and over and over except I DON’T CARE. anyways, long story short, turns out isla was getting it on w rhysand before all the events of book 1 but things went south and so he took away her memories (after she asked him to, I KNEW IT!The one star is reserved for the astronomical level of smut and it being too much alike SJM’S acotar series and writing. Aster has a dedicated audience of more than 905,500 followers on TikTok with 100 million views, and 60K followers on Instagram. Alex Aster is an author of YA fiction as well as award-winning middle grade fiction, including the Emblem Island series, which was published to critical acclaim. Gorgeously lush and cinematic Lightlark is the kind of fantasy that indulges all your senses, makes you swoon, and then knocks you sideways with twists.

hey babe, so i’m in love with you and all and you’re like super hot, but no so i actually don’t want to touch you. looking over that review, i stand by it and am here to report that the prose was less try-hard lyrical and adverby. It feels like it doesn’t matter because everyone is just using their starsticks to portal around and hook up. pages of yapping is just unacceptable, especially for a book that actually has an editor and publisher. Now, in the wake of a crushing betrayal, Isla finds herself hungry for distraction, preferring to frequent Lightlark?even historic lore is obfuscated in service of a surprise reveal that the book speedruns through in the final 3%. i definitely have more complaints i just don’t have the memory to remember them, so i guess aster gets off this time. As we learn more about the world, we see more people, and they're more diverse than in the first book.

granted, i cried more from seeing a squirrel fall off a power line about two weeks ago so maybe that’s not as important as it sounds, but i swear IT COULD HAVE BEEN GOOD.Once again, it feels like the politics of the rulers only exist to make moral quandaries for the main character amd to be catalysts for her relationships with the other two love interests. I mean, I don't think anyone expected a huge jump in quality, but it would be interesting to see what improvements the author made. The book does not have much to say about love or pain or the cure/poison other than reflecting how Isla loves, how Grim feels pain, and uhhh. i don’t particularly like isla and i don’t like either of the “love interests,” oro or grim, but she should not have been with oro. deadass there was a whole scene where isla wears a small black dress fashioned EXACTLY like the one feyre wears in the court of nightmares to go outside with grim and ends up sitting on his lap.

this is not the happy ending i wanted, but it’s also not the tragedy i would have taken, so it’s just boring instead.Now, in the wake of a crushing betrayal, Isla finds herself hungry for distraction, preferring to frequent Lightlark’s seductive haunts instead of embracing her duties as the newly crowned leader of two separate realms. She's so insecure about all of this, she almost feels like a different character from the first book, but maybe that's because she had little personality to begin with and her appeal relied on how good she was at fighting and also how sexy she is. seductive haunts instead of embracing her duties as the newly crowned leader of two separate realms.