This gorgeously imagined YA debut blends shades of Neil Gaiman's Stardust and a breathtaking landscape of Hindu mythology into a radiant contemporary fantasy.
The daughter of a star and a mortal, Sheetal is used to keeping secrets. Pretending to be "normal." But when an accidental flare of her starfire puts her human father in the hospital, Sheetal needs a full star's help to heal him. A star like her mother, who returned to the sky long ago.
Sheetal's quest to save her father will take her to a celestial court of shining wonders and dark shadows, where she must take the stage as her family's champion in a competition to decide the next ruling house of the heavens--and win, or risk never returning to Earth at all.
Look at that cover. Just look at it. Drink it in. Isn't it amazing?
I love Stardust, and I love reading stories based in mythologies other than the one I grew up in. I was really looking forward to this. And I can see the influences of Stardust, most notably in the market Sheetal visits early on. I could easily imagine Dunstan wandering around it. The descriptions were amazing, too, really lush and detailed; I could see and smell and hear everything that was going on.
Unfortunately, for me, the story itself didn't hold up. Everything felt a little rushed, and characters made leaps that I couldn't follow. At the climax, I didn't even know what was happening until the characters explained it to each other afterwards. Now, maybe that's my fault and I was missing clues and hints in the text, but maybe not.
I did enjoy it overall, and I'll definitely read other books by Shveta, because I very much like her style and I can't wait to be swept away again. Now, where's my Stardust DVD?
The daughter of a star and a mortal, Sheetal is used to keeping secrets. Pretending to be "normal." But when an accidental flare of her starfire puts her human father in the hospital, Sheetal needs a full star's help to heal him. A star like her mother, who returned to the sky long ago.
Sheetal's quest to save her father will take her to a celestial court of shining wonders and dark shadows, where she must take the stage as her family's champion in a competition to decide the next ruling house of the heavens--and win, or risk never returning to Earth at all.
Look at that cover. Just look at it. Drink it in. Isn't it amazing?
I love Stardust, and I love reading stories based in mythologies other than the one I grew up in. I was really looking forward to this. And I can see the influences of Stardust, most notably in the market Sheetal visits early on. I could easily imagine Dunstan wandering around it. The descriptions were amazing, too, really lush and detailed; I could see and smell and hear everything that was going on.
Unfortunately, for me, the story itself didn't hold up. Everything felt a little rushed, and characters made leaps that I couldn't follow. At the climax, I didn't even know what was happening until the characters explained it to each other afterwards. Now, maybe that's my fault and I was missing clues and hints in the text, but maybe not.
I did enjoy it overall, and I'll definitely read other books by Shveta, because I very much like her style and I can't wait to be swept away again. Now, where's my Stardust DVD?
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