aristifer 's review for:

The Stardust Thief by Chelsea Abdullah

3.0

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I don’t want to be too harsh on this one, because I was listening to the audiobook while I had the flu and was generally very cranky and foggy-headed. But it just never really grabbed me. I found the pacing very uneven, especially at the beginning—it just felt like a ton of superfluous setup before the inciting incident. I also was frustrated that the characters all seemed to have very little agency—the whole plot is them being manipulated by the villains and stumbling into trouble—and the characters themselves simply weren’t interesting enough to surmount that and keep me invested. The audiobook performance was probably also a factor; I quite like Nikki Massoud as a narrator (she was especially excellent in the Rook and Rose series), which is one of the reasons I decided to pick this up as an audiobook, but unfortunately, the male narrator was extremely grating, particularly in his performance of the female characters. I’m sure there are some readers who will love this book, especially those who enjoy tropes connected to the One Thousand and One Nights and stories set in the Middle East, but it wasn’t for me.