Warning: This review will contain mild spoilers.
I’m honestly not sure where to begin with this, when I first heard about Lightlark by Alex Aster I was excited! The premise sounded so good, The Hunger Games meets royal scheming and court politics! It was blowing up everywhere and so I decided to pre-order it from Waterstones, but then months later the online tide turned… People were suspicious of just how popular it was getting considering it is from an author with no big backing, and yet it got a movie deal before release. But then the early reviews started to come out close to the release and… people were not happy. Things that the author had said were in the book were not among other things which I will come back to later.
I saw all of this and was conflicted (and at this point it had been so long since I pre-ordered that I didn’t remember doing so) whether to buy the book or not. I decided I wouldn’t but would read it eventually, then my pre-order turned up and I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt, especially after Aster had been treated with such contempt by the book community.
So, Lightlark is about an island called Lightlark which is only accessible for 100 days every 100 years, for the Centennial. In this event, the monarchs of 6 nations gather to try and break their curses, but one must die and their realm along with them. We follow Isla, leader of the Wildlings, who are cursed with beauty, but also to kill whoever they fall in love with. In order to break the curse plaguing her people, Isla must survive the Centennial.
I truly loved the idea of this book, I wanted to buy into it so badly but the execution is just not good at all. The writing is so childlike, torn between trying too hard and not trying at all (i.e. describing scenery as ‘thing’ - ‘a cliffy thing’ or ‘the sun was a yolky thing’) which is really odd to read because there were some pretty sentences and yet there were so many that felt as if they should not have been able to make it through the revisions process. We also had her call what is essentially a wand a ‘starstick’ which just feels wholly childish, why not just call it a wand? But also down to the realms themselves, it felt as if there had been no thought put into it at all. We have Wilding, Skyling, Starling, Sunling, Moonling and Nightshade. I mean at least they do what they say on the tin, and you can tell who the ‘bad guy’ is because theirs doesn’t end in ‘ling’ and it sounds ‘dark’. When the realms were introduced I genuinely laughed at the names because I didn’t think it was serious. It was. But also throughout the book, it feels as if we are just told everything, there is hardly any showing, any interpretation done by the reader. We are just told what is happening, how characters feel.
So yeah, the writing was just not good. But that also applies to the characters, they felt so one dimensional and unexplored. I feel there is so much more that could have been done to show depth to them, and there just wasn’t. Isla can maybe be excused as she is only 18 so obviously not as nuanced as the 500+ year old characters surrounding her but the interesting things about her still could have been explored in more depth, and weren’t. There were also massive inconsistencies with her characterisation given her background which just didn’t make sense. She was also very much a ‘I’m not like the other girls/people in my realm’ which felt really odd, I still don’t understand some of the choices making her ‘different’ to her subjects. I found I didn’t care for Isla or any of the other characters at all, some purely because they got about two scenes.
I also think that the comparison to The Hunger Games is completely unfair, because it is not like it at all. The ‘contestants’ aren’t allowed to kill one another until 50 days into the Centennial, it seems that only one has to die, and there are basically no action scenes. The court politics I was excited for were also just not executed well, they all seemed to do their own thing for the majority of the book and there were hardly any group interactions. What I expected from the blurb was court politics and I couldn’t find it.
The book is also scattered with plot holes, which I am going to put down to the bad writing and that it was in desperate need of more editing rounds. The main plot hole being that though they’ve held the Centennial four times previously, no one has won and no one has died? I just don’t think it was explained well at all, why they keep doing it (outside wanting to break the curses) and why no one has died or won it before. The others centre Isla, the other realms and the curses and their creation. But the whole thing just feels as if it were half thought through.
It feels like the stakes aren’t high at all, which is ridiculous considering that each realm has a unique curse and each ruler could die, wiping out their realm with them. And yet, it never really feels urgent, I didn’t feel as if I would care if any of the curses didn’t break, or if any of the rulers and their realms died out.
I agree with a lot of the reviews that say that the whole thing is essentially without plot, and just tropes strung together. Because it really is. We have a love triangle, ‘enemies’ to lovers, a teenager sought after by people who have been alive for 500 years, and others that I won’t mention because spoilers. But I just found it frustrating, it did feel as if Aster just wanted to write tropes, not an actual fleshed out story. From her TikTok marketing it wasn’t the tropes that got me intrigued, but the plot premise, so I was just very disappointed. Others were annoyed that Aster has posted clips on her TikTok promoting the book with moments that are literally not included in the book, and I feel their frustration because that’s how I feel about the plot. I think that there are real issues with this trope marketing, as it does remove the selling point of a plot, suddenly we don’t seem to care what a book is about as long as it has a certain trope. So at least Lightlark has led to some interesting conversations!
I was intrigued though which did keep me reading, I read the whole book in a day because I found it so easy to read and wanted to know what happened (to see if the plot actually got better) so I think that is the only reason I gave it two stars. Though honestly, it was probably more of a 1.5 read for me. I might read the sequel when it comes out just to see what happens but I doubt I will pre-order it. I’m also intrigued by the movie deal because although the book is bad, I think it could do well as a film because it will be rewritten and possibly edited to fit film better, so I think I’ll watch it when it comes out to see if the plot is done better!
'There are lies and liars all around you.' is how I feel seeing the very early 5 star reviews now.
Overall, it was just too childish for me. I understand that I am a 24 year old reading what is meant to be a YA book, but when it is advertised as having ‘spice’, it stops being a YA book. Even if the ‘spice’ level is the equivalent of a chicken korma. It just wasn’t for me, I think Alex Aster was aiming for an older YA book, but her writing style and the constant need to tell rather than show just let her down and made it seem as if she were still writing for children who constantly need to be reminded of the world rules, which if you’re including ‘spice’ should not be your target audience. I honestly just wish the writing had been better, there was so much potential, this could have been a great book.
But, of course this is just my opinion on it and I would encourage you to read it yourself to make your own judgement, there are some good and intriguing parts of the story. Unfortunately, for me they were just overshadowed by the bad, but I do hope that if Aster and her team take on the criticisms of the reviews that the sequel can and will be better! If you’ve read it please let me know what you think, I’m intrigued!
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