A review by abby_gail_noel
Lightlark by Alex Aster

3.0

I’m not going to waste too much breath on this. It was a very average book so I’ll be making my points as averagely as I can.

The pros
- mildly entertaining
- weirdly comforting (as in, “I feel like I’ve read this somewhere before but I’m not mad about it)
- the prose is surprisingly decent for a tik tok book
- the story had some structure so I got through it pretty fast (didn’t take years off my life)
- the ending was predictable but ultimately intriguing

The cons
- the plot made absolutely no sense
- the worldbuilding and explanations of a lot of things felt incomplete
- there is little that is original or creative about the plot or characters (felt appropriated/cobbled together from other books)
- the main character is unlikeable for some reason (I think it’s because I’ve read 75,000 variations of this one character and they all have the same personality [aka no personality])
- there are too many metaphors and many of them are nonsensical
- it relies too heavily on cliché tropes
- the romance is stale and grim as a character is a WALKING ICK
- the names all give me a stomach ache reading them (grim, isla, azul, oro… like what)
- if I read “grim grinned” one more time in this lifetime I’m going to have a brain aneurysm (I wish I had a memory eraser for that one, it gives me bad feelings in my tummy!)
- to reiterate my earlier point, NOTHING IS EXPLAINED WELL AND EVERYTHING IS OVERLY CONVOLUTED

Overall, the book was fine. It wasn’t particularly good or bad so I’m not going to rave about it but I’m also not going to keep ragging on it. In the end, I just think it could have benefitted from some more originality and general polishing. I kind of enjoyed it so no hate. I honestly would have given it a 4 if it weren’t for the lack of new, creative ideas. I just can’t give an author credit for content that isn’t fully theirs.

Anyway … thank you for your time.