I read Of Fire and Stars

This week's novel is Of Fire and Stars by Audrey Coulthurst.

Princess Dennaleia is betrothed to the crown prince of Mynaria as part of an alliance between their two countries.  She also has fire magic, which is seen as heresy in Mynaria.  When she arrives in Mynaria, there are a series of assassination attempts on the royal family that threaten to draw Mynaria and Danneleia's home country into war with a third nation.  She also discovers that her magic is much stronger in Mynaria, and that people with magic are treated very poorly.  On top of this, she finds that he's more drawn to her betrothed's sister, Mare, than the prince.

The slow burn romance between Dannaleia and Mare in this is very good.  I get why they both like each other.  They have great chemistry.  The challenges to their relationship are logical.  And the story gets bonus points for having a lesbian couple front and center.

Also, all the names are excellent.  I love them.  They're great.  Names are hard and these all made me want to live in a magical place where I would have a sweet, long name.

But the rest of the plot was frustrating.  There are four assassination attempts, of which a few are successful, and security around the castle is never increased and everyone still thinks it's a good idea to sneak around past the few guards that are there.  When they find evidence that the country that welcomes magic users is not responsible for the assassinations, but is being framed to start a war, all the leaders of Mynaria together decide that, nah, it's probably that evil country of magic users and it's not worth checking to see if they're going to war with the wrong people.  Characters uncover a part of the mystery, and then don't share what they found with anyone and then fifty pages later they uncover the same thing again and then fifty pages after that put together what I understood a hundred pages ago.  It makes the non-romance part of the plot feel stgnant.  Everyone in leadership is so incompetent that I found it really hard to worry about them being assassinated. 

I found myself much more interested in the magical people who live in Mynaria and the problems they faced. Ambient magic builds up in the air like gas out of a stove, so if no one is using magic to burn it off (if, for example, all the magic users that can be found are rounded up, thrown in prison, and drugged) the magic will build up, so if one person (like, say, Dannaleia) uses magic by accident, it will explode in a big ball of fire.  It turns out that there's a temple in Dannaleia's home country where magic users regularly go to burn off the ambient magic and keep everything in balance, but by the terms of the new treaty, magic users are no longer allowed in the temple.  There's a lot to get into here about the dangers of keeping information from people and the dangers of fearing whole groups because you don't understand them.  This is high-stakes and interesting and I want to know more about it.  But we don't get much of that.

Furthermore, since I sympathized with the magic users so much more than with the people oppressing them, pretty early on I wanted the alliance to fall apart.  That also made this a frustrating read, since Dannaleia spends so much time and energy trying to hold the alliance together. 

So if it were a straight up star-crossed romance and all the other plot threads were removed, would I have liked it more?  If these threads had been fleshed out and if characters had done a better job leading the nation they were supposed to be ruling, would the romance have fallen into the background?  I don't know.

***

Next week: Listen to Your Heart, contemporary YA by Kasie West.