Star Eater by Kerstin Hall was beautiful and grotesque, a story of lineage and power. It was everything I didn’t know I needed.
***
All martyrdoms are difficult.

Elfreda Raughn will avoid pregnancy if it kills her, and one way or another, it will kill her. Though she’s able to stomach her gruesome day-to-day duties, the reality of preserving the Sisterhood of Aytrium’s magical bloodline horrifies her. She wants out, whatever the cost.

So when a shadowy faction approaches Elfreda with an offer of escape, she leaps at the opportunity. As their spy, she gains access to the highest reaches of the Sisterhood, and enters a glittering world of opulent parties, subtle deceptions, and unexpected bloodshed.
***
A fascinatingly horrifying world where the Sisterhood runs their floating city Aytrium, cannibalistic rituals offer the sisters their source of magic, lace, and any of the sisters having sex with men basically turn them into horrifying zombie like monsters whose objective is to kill those in the sisterhood after they’ve turned.
Elfreda finds herself drawn into a part of the sisterhood she wasn’t aware existed, because she was used to doing the day to day work and keeping her head low and hating with all her heart when her time to serve Renewal comes.
For a story about religion and cannibalism there was not as much of that as you’d think but really it was a story of political intrigue, of one side of the Sisterhood overshadowing the overall good they really could be doing in Aytrium and Elfreda coming to grips with the history of where the Sisterhood started and where and how that has driven them over the years.
While the story did have a couple points where it seemed to wander from driving forward I really did greatly enjoy this story, it wasn’t the story I thought I’d be getting but still an interesting world.
***
Thanks to Netgalley and the Publisher I was able to listen to this book in exchange for an honest review.
I really enjoyed the narrator’s voice throughout the book, she was pleasant to listen to and really helped keep me drawn to the story.

The Short Version: A competently written fantasy that is half palace intrigue, half magical journey. It stumbled out of the blocks but got better as it went, but was a let down because of the tangled mess that comprised the magic system.

The Long Version: I got to listen to the audiobook of this title thanks to NetGalley and Recorded Books.

This is a really tough one for me, as I almost feel bad for not giving it a higher rating. I didn’t find this book overly enjoyable, but at the same time, I know in my bones that it’s well written and mostly well executed. I’m confident there will be large groups of people who absolutely fall in love with this book.

Before I get too deep into the book itself, let me take a moment to recognize the tremendous work of the narrator in this audiobook. There is a single narrator to this audiobook, but I would’ve sworn that it was a cast performance. The voice work was the absolute best but I have heard in any audiobook I’ve listened to.

A lot of the problems I have with this book actually stem from the description given about it. The language in the blurb creates a dense gothic atmosphere. I had a weighty expectation of gore, viscera, and the macabre, and while there were moments of it, this wasn’t a bloodbath. This read much more like Pride and Prejudice, than Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Going in with an unrealistic impression of what the book would be, definitely hurt my listening experience.

The opening chapter has some tension to it, so there was promise right off the bat, but very quickly devolved into a meandering palace intrigue story. In the earlier chapters, the author tries to tease at the magic system providing vague glimpses instead of a fuller picture. I’m sure this is meant to draw the reader in, but for me it created more distance between myself and the story, considering the macabre wasn’t there, and I was expecting a different type of story than it turned out to be.

I also struggled to get on board with the protagonist. The book is described as an “Indictment of hereditary power”, yet the protagonist comes from the privileged class and we’re made to feel that she’s the victim. Her words and thoughts for about 80% of the book also portray her as mostly unsympathetic to the blight of the lower less privileged class. She mostly seems to dislike the most elite because they do things to her that she doesn’t like, not because their actions are necessarily immoral in her eyes. Basically I feel that if she wasn’t personally targeted, she would have quietly gone along with even the most egregious acts that her sisters perpetrated.

There’s a romance thrown in that I’m sure is supposed to endear you to the protagonist as well, so that you were rooting for their love. Problem is, the love interest is too pure, too white night, and reads as an archetype with too little gradation.

Even while there were a lot of things that put distance between me and this book, I can recognize that it’s well written and mostly well constructed. The plot follows a logical plot line, there’s twists, there’s betrayals, there’s life or death stakes. All of this is written in seamless prose that never draws your attention in a negative way. In that respect, it was easy to feel like I was experiencing a story, not being read a story.

The action picks up about 40% through the book, but that point there was so much distance between me and the story that I struggled to become fully invested. From that 40% mark however it’s a much crisper narrative and more tightly paced.

Unfortunately, where it picks up a lot of steam as it propels to the finish, I was not a fan of the ending either. Based on the tensions between factions clearly illustrated throughout the book, the description of the “After” seems far too “and they all lived happily ever after” where I would expect political warring if not outright war.

But i’ve saved the biggest dealbreaker for last. This magic system was messy. The idea of cannibalistic magic drew me to this story, I thought it would be dark and vicious, but instead it was really mostly staid and Victorian. Putting that aside, there was a ton that didn’t make sense to me in the magic system. The biggest issue was the sisters (magic users) would run out of magical power, then recharge by eating the bodies of martyred sisters. So, why don’t these martyrs run out of power? How are they these endless batteries? Also the limits of the magic were very vague considering it was a central component to the story. Lastly, the uses of the magic seemed really small compared to the costs of it, like there seemed to be little point to maintaining the system considering how it all worked. This is explained a little toward the end, but by then I was fully over the system.

Overall 3 stars. There are plenty of people who will really like this story, but it failed to grab me off the bat, and I was left with so many questions on the magic system which is what drew me in to begin with.

Component Ratings
Concept/Idea: 3.5 out of 5
Protagonist: 2.5 out of 5
Antagonists: 4 out of 5
Supporting Characters: 3 out of 5
Character Development: 2.5 out of 5
Magic System: 1.5 out of 5
Plot: 4.5 out of 5
Pacing: 2.5 out of 5
Narrators Performance: 4.5 out of 5
Prose: 4 out of 5
Dialogue: 4 out 5
Ending: 2 out of 5

DNF @ 32%, I really wanted to like this, and maybe I would if I read it in book form, but the prose and narration sound rambly and I'm having trouble figuring out the other plot besides the fact that she doesn't want to be pregnant. Oh, well.

DNF at 30%

This was one of my most anticipated reads this year, and it was such a huge let down.

The worldbuilding is watered down and we have the stereotypical white female protagonist that is constantly all “woe is me”.

One of the aspects of this book that really doesn’t sit well with me is the claim that the nuns of the sisterhood are all bisexual and/or lesbian because in this book, the nuns can’t be with men because they become infected and turn into zombie like beasts. This literally implies that the nuns are queer by default, which…is not okay.

Also, this book operates fully within the gender binary, so while the world is queer normative there’s no trans or non-binary people.

I found this book to be overall enjoyable. It was dark, twisted, and magical.

The plot was unique and the authors writing was simply beautiful and kept me hooked even when the story felt slow-paced.

The world-building was well done and was certainly unlike anything I've read before (especially considering all of the cannibalism).

But I found the ending to be unsatisfactory; it seemed rushed. There was also an unfortunate lack of character growth.