Publication: April 26th 2016 by St. Martin's Griffin
Goodreads description:
Fate and fortune. Power and passion. What does it take to be the queen of a kingdom when you’re only seventeen?
Maya is cursed. With a horoscope that promises a marriage of death and destruction, she has earned only the scorn and fear of her father’s kingdom. Content to follow more scholarly pursuits, her whole world is torn apart when her father, the Raja, arranges a wedding of political convenience to quell outside rebellions. Soon Maya becomes the queen of Akaran and wife of Amar. Neither roles are what she expected: As Akaran’s queen, she finds her voice and power. As Amar’s wife, she finds something else entirely: Compassion. Protection. Desire…
But Akaran has its own secrets—thousands of locked doors, gardens of glass, and a tree that bears memories instead of fruit. Soon, Maya suspects her life is in danger. Yet who, besides her husband, can she trust? With the fate of the human and Otherworldly realms hanging in the balance, Maya must unravel an ancient mystery that spans reincarnated lives to save those she loves the most…including herself.
My thoughts:
Unfortunately I didn't love The Star-Touched Queen like I had hoped. I think my expectations were too high due to all the hype surrounding this book when I picked it up.
The writing is gorgeous. It has this poetic and whimsical style and it was beautiful. Even though I loved the writing I found myself getting lost in the descriptions and ending up confused about what was happening. This happened to me a number of times and it took away from the plot because I had to keep stopping and rereading sections to understand what was happening.
I wasn't the biggest fan of the main character Maya. She constantly made stupid decisions and was extremely impulsive which annoyed me. She meets Amar and decides right then and there to marry him after knowing him for literally 10 seconds. She easily could have went with him without marrying him.
I didn't like Amar either. He was way too mysterious for my liking. He doesn't let Maya know everything that is going on. I found him to be a but hypocritical- he said they would be equals but to be honest he wasn't treating her like one. He keeps a lot of secrets. I feel like I still don't know him even after spending the majority of the book with him.
The romance was just okay.Personally, I didn't feel any chemistry between Maya and Amar. I think I didn't like it because in the beginning it comes across as Amar being in love with Maya even though they only met. So it was a bit instalovey.
I liked some of the side characters but I wish they were developed more- particularly Maya's sister Gauri and a character/ creature we are introduced to towards the end of the story.
I think the magic was not explained that well. There was no structure to it; there were no rules or limits explained for using magic. I was so confused about what they could/ couldn't do and how and why.
The world building was a bit messy. There was a lot of info dumping. I have a lot of questions that were never answered and because The Star-Touched Queen is a standalone I won't get answers.
Overall, The Star-Touched Queen was an okay read but I won't be picking it up again, I was confused most of the time while reading.
My rating: 2.5 stars
Thanks for reading,
A :)
Follow my blog with Bloglovin
No comments:
Post a Comment