Booktok is a subcommunity of TikTok that is known for tiaras, their loud and proud love of various tropes, and of course, their passion for books. It is a powerful force on social media, used by both readers and authors alike to promote books they love and books they are writing and has pushed quite a few authors into massive popularity.
One such author is Alex Aster.
Before her YA debut, she first published The Emblem Island middle grade duology, but it was the teasers she released for Lightlark that really seized Booktok’s attention and was quickly steeped in controversy upon its release.
On a technical level, Aster can write well, she has good use of authorial voice for things like description and her style overall is easy to read.
The novel itself has quite a few interesting concepts. An island that appears every thousand years to hold a tournament, royals fighting to the death to end curses placed upon them and their land, escaping from said tournament through a secret heist so that the characters might have a chance to live, attempting to seduce a king while a supposed enemy shows romantic interest in the main character, that and many other ideas are presented in this novel.
And that is precisely what also holds this novel back.
While many of these ideas are intriguing in concept, they all lack one main thing. Focus. Many novels have B or even C plots, all of them interconnecting back to the main events and Aster attempts to do the same with these plot threads, but it all becomes more entangled and confusing the further along you read. At one point, one of the mentioned plot threads is implied to have unknown and potentially dangerous consequences and at a later point, yet it is implied that this same plot thread will somehow lift the curses the rulers are afflicted with. It’s a moment that would make most readers raise their eyebrows and wonder why there’s even a tournament in the first place if this heist is all that is needed to lift the curse.
Readers who detest love triangles will find themselves infuriated as this one seems to play out in full, despite Aster prompting on TikTok that she was going for enemies-to-lovers. One has to wonder if Aster was attempting to subvert expectations with this.
The curses are also told to the reader rather than shown to them, the novel simply telling us they’re bad. While Isla’s curse could be disastrous in the future, it doesn’t hold the same weight when the curses that face the others have far more impending consequences. Given what we learn about her later on in the novel, one would think that Aster would have selected that secret to be her curse rather than the one she decided to go with.
Pacing is another issue this book struggles with. Before the novel’s tournament can take place, there’s an event known as the Centennial, which serves as both a celebration and opening act, allowing the rulers to display their skills before they are forced to face in combat. It’s a premise clearly inspired by The Hunger Games and while that in itself is fine, Lightlark lingers on this event with little interaction going on between Isla and the other characters. The only thing that truly keeps any action going on at all is the heist subplot and even that is drawn out longer than necessary. It’s a good twenty-five chapters into the novel before we see her interact with the other characters for more than just a few pages.
The actual tournament itself takes much longer to get to then it should for a book who advertises that its plot is centered around said tournament. Had Aster attempted to put more focus into the tournament part of the plot, a good portion of the preliminaries could have been cut out and condensed into something more streamlined.
Strangest of all is the tournament itself. It is revealed that the event is something else entirely and not a tournament in the sense that most readers would be familiar with. While killing is allowed after The Centennial, there is no fighting between the rulers. Instead they all gather for a series of meetings to discuss which realms deserve to live and which one should ultimately fall. While this in and of itself is a terrifying prospect and one that could work if written well, the reader has instead been misled into thinking they would be reading about a tournament where the rulers must fight to the death to break their curses. Instead they get something akin to a political debate, which would be fine if that was what the book had been advertised as from the beginning.
A sequel is implied to be in the works and while the reception to this book has been met with mixed reception, perhaps Aster and her editors will acknowledge the criticism given and ensure the sequel is more focused and not riddled with the inconsistencies that plagued the first one.
Overall, while there was some potential, Lightlark, in my opinion, fails to deliver to its intended audience and is a frustrating read to those who simply want to get lost in a good fantasy.
What do you think? Does Lightlark live up to the hype? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!
Written By:
Lauren Lapinski
Information and Digital Services Assistant
Hoboken Library Staff Picks 