fannaforbooks 's review for:

The City of Stardust by Georgia Summers

4.75

adventurous mysterious tense fast-paced

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Reading this left me in a trance. The beautiful writing, the mystery, the fairytale-esque unravelling, and an enticing amount of darkness. I highly recommend this magical debut.  

Summers opens The City of Stardust with a prologue that intrigues when children go missing around the world: a baby from his pram, a child of two from Vienna, a boy with grey eyes from Prague. All vanishing away with a woman carrying a strong vanilla scent. At the same time, Marianne is walking into a thunderstorm, leaving behind her little daughter, hoping to find answers for a curse clouding over her family, the Everlys, for years. She takes a worn key from around her neck, turns it in the air—and vanishes. This also where Summers first impresses with the beautiful writing. Describing a curse like a star falling across the sky, something poetically tragic. 

A curse can be many things. A wish left out to spoil in the sun, putrid and soft, leaving behind only calcified desire and oxidised envy. Or a poisoned chalice, a mistake tattooed across an entire family tree, with every generation promising, vowing to never sip until they do. Sometimes, it’s a deal and bad luck conspiring like old grifters closing in on an easy mark.

Everything about this single paragraph lured me into the story, purely through the writing. The way Summers takes an aspect that drives this fantasy and asks you to imagine it in ways that grounds its impact is remarkable. Here, curse isn’t just a prophecy playing out or magic gone wrong. A curse is described through its opposite, as a wish that has degraded over time. Or a wish that one realises too late is an invitation to tragedy, forced to watch it rot itself and everything around. A curse is then imagined as a “poisoned chalice”—a mistake—whose consequences the family is well aware of, yet a mistake they ultimately make, sooner or later. Here, the inevitability of a generational curse carries the horror of inescapable mistakes that are bound to be repeated. Finally, Summers personifies two sides of the same coin that hold the potential to destruct. After all, a deal gone wrong is basically bad luck playing out with your consent. And bad luck itself is a deal you’ve made with fortune—a deal that doesn’t serve you well. This combination is bound to birth a curse.

Read the full review on my blog!