Reviews with content warning for Fire/Fire injury - The City of Stardust

I genuinely have no idea what the plot is to this story and I have read it. It was just 340 pages of nothing which is so disappointing because the concept for it was so interesting.

Essentially, after finding out that her family (nore specifically, Violet) is cursed, Violet spends a year of her life running around the world trying to find her mother who ran away when Violet was 8. She befriends a scholar who is about as interesting as drywall, and encounters Gods (

one of which Gabriel later tries to fight off with a chair, an event that genuinely made me consider DNFing for the 8th time but it was 100 pages from the end so

) and friends of her mother who do absolutely nothing to progress the story or help her understand anything.

Everyone in this story hides the truth from Violet and is super vague about everything, but somehow Violet knows where to look after conversations that hold about as much weight as air. The only tolerable character is Caspian who gets about 5 pages. The only character who has a set nationality is Yury (

and honestly I don't love the fact that the Russian character is written as what is essentially a terrorist

).

Fidelis is definitely, 100% based on Velaris from ACOTAR with it being a City of Stars (granted it is Stardust instead of Starlight). A city which is visited maybe 3 times total and not for very long each time it is mentioned. The city is but a vague promise to the reader in the greater scheme of things, especially when the majority of the story takes place somewhere in the world.

There is some absolutely gorgeous writing and scene-setting in this book for sure. The sentence structure is genuinely stunning. The chapters are short and easy to get through without issue. However, the pacing is just so weird and at times I felt like I was missing context for what was happening and why.

I genuinely have no idea what that book was and I am massively disappointed with it. I should have saved myself the time and energy and DNFed.

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purplepenning's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No

3.0

Undoubtedly beautiful prose and an interesting fantasy premise that blends a modern setting with an old world dark fairytale vibe (via portal doors). Overall, however, the story, pacing, and character development just didn't click for me.

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embee007's review against another edition

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adventurous slow-paced

Diverse cast of characters? No

4.5

“Do you really believe the curse isn’t real? That the divine never touches you? That the wheeling cosmos is but an abstract of chemicals? Do you not hear the stars sing, little dreamer?”

The proooooose 😍

"She is glory. She is devastation. And she is hungry."

If you loved the imagery of The Starless Sea or wished The Starless Sea had a plot? This is the book for you.

"What joy it will bring us to see you undone."

This was a cover buy, & I have zero regrets, but ½ a point off because I once again fell into the quicksand trap of a gothic book & took nearly a week to read it 🫠

"From nothing, to nothing.”

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carrykyrie's review against another edition

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adventurous dark reflective tense

4.5

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lilifane's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

WTF did I just read?
I was really expecting something totally different but was pleasantly surprised by this book.
The writing is so beautiful, lush, sensual and the atmosphere it creates reminded me immensely of The Starless Sea (which might be my favorite book of all times, so I was pretty biased once I noticed the similarities). They have some plot points, themes and imagery in common, but it's mostly the vibes I'm talking about. Mainly, the no plot just vibes attitude.
I did enjoy the plot, it felt like a dark fairy tale, and it went darker places than I expected. There were pacing issues, though, and a lot of conveniences and weird character decisions. Speaking of the characters, since the focus is mostly on the vibes and the fairy tale story structure, the characters were not as flashed out as I usually like. Especially Violet, the protagonist, felt one dimensional. Secondary characters like Penelope and Aleksander were way more memorable than Violet, and their motivations were more nuanced and intriguing.
But again, the way the atmosphere and the vibes were making me feel... I was longing for this feeling since I've read The Starless Sea for the first time. And it's really hard to find, so I'm just happy to have experienced it again with this book. And despite it not being a perfect book, I loved it with all my heart.

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skillyillian's review against another edition

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dark mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.5

Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for an eARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

I really wanted to love this book. The concepts are insanely cool and the author's writing style is very interesting, but beyond that, it felt like a lot of potential that was left to the wayside. The entire story feels like just a bunch of things that happen to someone, instead of a series of challenges that directly affect the FMC and push her past some kind of boundary. The logic of this story is so broken in most places that, if it weren't for the author basically going "she's necessary to this event because I said so" then the FMC's presence wouldn't have made a difference for half this story in the first place.

The story revolves around Violet Everly and the curse that haunts her family. They're given ten years to find her missing mother, who left to apparently find a way to break this curse. Eventually, the task falls to Violet, who is suddenly savvy enough to travel the world on her own despite having been homeschooled and has never left the small town she's spent her entire life in. Whatever, not a huge problem, except that

most of the time she spends traveling is summed up in less than a page. She learns so much about the world, the scholars of the magical city from the other world, etc etc over the course of a year and it's boiled down to a few paragraphs that list some cities and that she went to some parties. it was really disappointing, i would've loved to have seen more of violet's world travels. things about the scholars are brought up later, and it's basically explained away as "she learned this while she was travelling" without any further context. it made her entire journey, that supposedly shaped who she was for the last half of the book, fall flat.

The logic in this book is my biggest complaint. Most of the major plot points, and even several smaller ones, feel like they got thrown in despite or without any prior context or consideration for what it would mean for characters, further plot, external or internal consequences, just .. anything, really. Everything felt very surface level plot without any deeper meaning or explanation, like the book was written and then someone went through and cut out almost all of the deeper context that would explain why things happened the way they did or why people made certain choices. There were a few major plot points that, had they felt like they had been genuine to the story and not just included to add drama, would have had serious emotional impact. But instead, it felt forced, and left me asking, "wait why did that just happen? if xyz just happened then how does abc even work???" multiple times.

One of the other things that disappointed me was the magic system. it could've been so cool, but beyond "this is a special material and only special people can manipulate it" there was almost no other explanation, or other use of it, period. violet is described as having this insane talent that should make her crazy powerful, but at the end of the day, she uses it once time to find out that something is magic, and that's it. that's literally it. the whole build up of all of her talent and she does not even touch it. why???

the ending was a let down, in all honesty it made violet's entire journey feel completely pointless and like she didn't even need to be involved in the first place.

violet's blood is needed to open a millennia-old door because she's an everly. but penelope has been harvesting everlys for centuries, soooo. why not use one of them? and the entire everly lineage exists because ever and penelope's daughter somehow escaped penelope's slaughter of the entire city. soooo either neither of them knew where she was and she was lucky enough to hide from her mom, she had already run away or been taken away, or penelope saved her? but if so then why didn't penelope explain it. and she couldn't have run away anyway. the child would've been less than a year old. so why was penelope hunting everlys to get back to elandriel if she saved her daughter? her daughter was an everly. why not use her daughter on the door. someone please explain. i don't get it. i genuinely hope i'm missing something because there were things like this all throughout the book.

There were also multiple POVs, which i usually love, but they would switch in the middle of chapters without any prior warning whatsoever, you'd just be reading from violet's pov and the next paragraph is somewhere else entirely, and from aleksander's pov.

This book is described as romance, but there was almost no romance other than a very sudden dedication between Violet and Aleksander that felt like it came out of nowhere. In the same way Violet's travels are skipped over, so too was the romance. The scenes where they were supposed to be falling in love were just "they spent hours together talking" with almost no real dialogue or even really what they talked about besides "he told her some stuff about where he came from" and that was pretty much it. The romance felt like it was just there so that Violet and Aleksander were willing to die for each other by the end of the book, instead of them genuinely caring about each other and being in love. It was all the dedication with none of the romance. You'd die for your dog the same way those two would die for each other.

One last note, there's a very dark event that happens towards the end of the book that, to me, just felt like it was thrown in to try to escalate the situation, and not because it made sense for the story. Fuel for the fire instead of what actually fit, so it felt gratuitous. TW // child death

penelope goes insane and slaughters the entire scholar tower, including the children. violet and aleksander find adult bodies at the door of the tower, go up and up, and eventually find the bodies of the children. the adult bodies would continue going up the stairs, but instead, violet and aleksander turn around and start heading towards the lowest basement of the tower, finding a room that was specifically stated as "penelope murdered anyone that knew about this until it was forgotten and no one knows this exists". did they only go up the stairs to find the kids, receive their designated trauma and motivation, and then go "welp anyway on to where we know she really went" despite penelope's quarters being above the children's floor? why would they ignore her rooms entirely, when they don't know where she is, and go somewhere else, let alone somewhere they had no way of knowing even existed? and then violet just stares at the fancy everly-blood-only door before KMSing. and then she just??? lives??? and it's literally never explained how ever saved her life and brought her back from being DEAD. it gets skipped over entirely. why? how? what?????? we're just gonna move on from "you were dead and he brought you back"???? ok sure. i guess.

Overall, there's a ton of potential in this book, but I wish someone had gone over the logic with a fine toothed comb before calling it a day. A lot of things happened without any further context and it felt like they were added for momentary drama before moving on and glazing over it entirely. Characters were brought in, only to be disappeared and suddenly no longer in the story at all as soon as the convenience of their threat ended. It's like they never existed. I ended up questioning more than half the events of the story and felt very passive about the rest of it. I know several others really liked it so maybe this just wasn't for me, but I couldn't get past all of the glaring flaws in the logic.

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