Book Review | Star Eater

Upon first hearing about Star Eater by Kerstin Hall, I was lured in by the promise of cannibalistic priestesses and a phantasmagorical indictment of hereditary power.

Sadly, however, the execution falls flat.

True, we do get glimmers of visceral hallucinations and deliciously grotesque monsters. However, there is an odd disconnect between the flowery descriptive writing and the dialogue itself. The dialogue (especially between Elfreda and her friends) is awkward and strangely juvenile and seems like it came out of a YA contemporary novel. They feel like they belong to two different books entirely.

Along these same lines, there isn’t much of a sense of time or setting for this story. There are a few mentions of lamps to hint that this is a gaslamp fantasy and only 2/3 of the way in do we find out that the city is floating—a fact that I would have thought at least one of the characters would have brought up earlier.

Lastly, there are huge revelations at the end, but they aren’t earth-shattering since the world and its lore weren’t really established in the first place.

Overall, this was an incredibly frustrating read since it is so conceptually brilliant and filled with so much wasted potential. I think I would have been much more immersed in this book if it had spent more time fleshing out and exploring its unique world instead of focusing on a food shortage subplot that turned out to be completely irrelevant in the end.

Thank you, Macmillan-Tor/Forge and NetGalley, for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Book Details:

Publication Date : June 22, 2021

Publisher : Tordotcom

ISBN : 1250625319

Pages : 444

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