amandalynn6 's review for:

Starlight by Olivia Wildenstein

3.75

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I have complaints. Some are my own fault because I had high expectations, and a different idea about what was going to happen in book 3. I wanted more political intrigue, I wanted better retribution, and I wanted more time spent in Elysium instead of on earth. Another big complaint I had was that this felt a lot more YA than the previous books. Naya and Adam were kids playing at being adults, and it’s not that I didn’t believe their love story as a result, but their youth made other things irritating. Let me explain, and this is may be spoilery so

Are you ever reading a book where they’re building towards the finale and everything looks real bad for our heroes, and you can see all the things that are gonna go wrong from a mile away because it can all be solved by just telling one person outside the group what you’re up to? It’s sort of like miscommunication in romance, where you just want to shake these people and say COME ON HOW CAN YOU BE SO STUPID??? I hate it, always, and this book would literally have no plot if Naya and Adam took a beat and just told their parents they were in trouble. And I get that sometimes it’s hard to tell our parents things because we’re afraid of how they’ll react, but at the same time, that reticence on their part just highlights how young and inexperienced they both are. All they had to do was just ask one single other angel if there was a punishment for deliberately harming a human, evil or not, and I could have saved myself like 200 pages.  This is also the fault of Asher and Celeste for keeping secrets, and not telling Naya and Adam about their enemies in Elysium, but come one anyone with half a brain would have questioned Dov’s very obvious duplicitousness and quite frankly neither Dov nor Claire got enough justice for these acts. Anyway the last 150 pages or so took me forever to read because I was so annoyed by fantasy’s version of the miscommunication trope

 

Ok I know that was maybe a lot of complaints considering I didn’t rate this too low, and If you’re still here, there’s a lot of things I did like. I loved how Naya and Adam had traces of Leigh and Jarod inside them, but were still their own people. I loved the beginning, and how Annoyed Adam was by her, even as he couldn’t stay away, and couldn’t figure out why that was. I loved the very end, when all the conflicts were over and everyone finally sat down with each other. I wish that had happened earlier, and we went up to Elysium for longer so we could have seen more of that, but I’m done complaining. I love Asher as an overbearing and grumpy overprotective dad. He was so cute, he’s my favorite still. I loved Tobias and Gabriel, and how much all of them loved their children. I loved seeing that dynamic with the angel parents in contrast with book 1 where we saw so many apathetic angel parents instead. I liked that change. 

Overall this was a good ending to the series. Not great, but again most complaints I have are my own expectations being dashed.