fatma's Reviews > The Stardust Thief

DNF at 35%

Didn't think that I'd DNF one of my most anticipated releases of the year, but here we are.

There is nothing egregiously wrong with The Stardust Thief, but that's exactly it: it felt so very average. It falls short of the mark for me in terms of both plot and character, but not so much that it's completely unreadable or actively bad. Everything is just competent enough that I could've pushed through it if I had had the patience, but I simply didn't. I can tell this wouldn't have gotten more than a 3 stars from me, maybe even less than that.

As I've seen some readers point out, this feels very YA--which is not an issue in and of itself if you tend to read and/or enjoy YA, but I generally don't, so there's that. More than a matter of genre or audience, though, I just felt like The Stardust Thief was simplistic in its execution. The characters are drawn in very broad strokes, and the plot only serves to push them along the narrative without really leaving enough space for them to breathe. I wanted more from this narrative: more complexity, more development, more layers. And The Stardust Thief maybe has the beginnings of all of that, but as it stands, it didn't deliver any of those things for me. I really wanted to like it, and I really did give it a chance, but reading it felt like such an uphill battle; at a certain point I realized that I was actively forcing myself to keep reading it, and then I knew that it just wasn't going to be the book for me.

Plenty of people have loved this, though, so it's really going to depend on what you look for and tend to enjoy in your fantasy.

Thanks so much to Orbit for sending me an ARC of this in exchange for an honest review!