RATING: 2.5/5
The Star-Touched Queen
Author: Roshani Choiski
Date of Publication: April 26, 2016
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Pages: 342
From Goodreads
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.
This book is full of words.
Yes. I know. terribly obvious. But I’m not talking about words as in the ones necessary for a story, but words that are just there. Words for the sake of filling it up. Essentially, fluff. Half of this book is composed of fluff.
All the prose and the purple… I mean, I’m always down for a little extra -- some flourish and shimmer to make the writing lyrical and prose-y, but this book was thick with it. It was beautiful at some moments yet I felt it to be completely irrelevant in others.
The writing was dense, which made reading a chore. Description upon description upon description… it was all too much for me. Soon, I found myself skimming through. Only a handful of times at the start, but soon I started flipping pages to find moments where the story did get good, instead of the monotone drone of description it had been for the past fifty pages.
I also felt strangely… detached as I read. Nothing grabbed me, nothing shocked me out of my skin. The presence of a pull, of something to make you want to continue wasn’t the strongest. Maybe it was because soon I became a bit numb to everything after being bored to death from the details Choiski kept throwing at us.
Yet despite this, I’ll have to hand it to her. The level of mystery she wove around the beginning, the confusion she caused as you read questioning each and every character and whether they were trustworthy was fantastic. That beginning was what grabbed me - and the mystery is what pushed me to finish.
After the magic tapered off towards the beginning, I was only slogging through the whole thing to finally get some answers. I just wanted answers, dangit.
Overall, this story wasn’t terribly impressive. If you’re one for embellished descriptions and more words than content, by all means go for it. But if you want intense, fast-paced action in a story, then maybe The Star-Touched Queen isn’t the book for you.
