Star Eater by Kerstin Hall follows the journey of Elfreda, a young woman who belongs to a magical order of nuns called the Sisterhood in the city of Ceyrun. When Elfreda finds herself stumbling into a tangled web of political intrigue and old secrets in order to get out of Renewals—the troubling ritual by which Sisters conceive children and condemn men to death—the complications go deeper than she could have ever imagined.

There was a lot to enjoy about Star Eater. The cannibal magic and all its interesting moral quandaries and political ramifications were a definite favourite for me, even if I would have loved more detail about how lace (the name for magic in this world) worked in general. Elfreda as a protagonist had a lot of agency and I appreciated her often making messy or ‘incorrect’ decisions in line with her personality and experience. Finn and Millie, the two most prominent side characters, made for a good trio dynamic. Elfreda is bisexual and there are other LGBTQ+ side characters which is always a bonus.

The worldbuilding made it a little difficult for me to connect with the stakes in Star Eater. There are a plethora of names and factions front loaded, but I didn’t really get a sense of why issues mattered until much later on in the novel. In addition, despite having LGBTQ+ characters, the in-world society revolves heavily around a gender binary, including gender essentialist and rigidly defined notions of reproduction. I’m sure this is fine for a lot of readers, but for me it made the novel fall short. The romance subplot also didn’t click for me as much as I would have liked.

Overall, Star Eater is an intriguing debut with a lot of cool concepts despite execution lacking in areas. In particular, given the first person POV and the coming of age themes, it would be a great fit for readers looking to transition from YA fantasy—so long as they enjoy a blend of horror and darker themes along with their fantasy.

Thank you to Tordotcom and NetGalley for an advance review copy. All opinions are my own.

The prose is easily the best part of the book and it really shines in its more gruesome scenes. The story otherwise felt a little one-dimensional and incohesive. The book often fails to set the scene, making the world feel blander than I would have expected, based on the premise. The story would have benefitted from either being trimmed down or expanded into multiple books. There were quite a few threads left hanging by the end of the book, making it feel jarring and anti-climatic. Ultimately, the book had so much potential but failed to do anything interesting with it.

Completely one of a kind novel. It blew my socks off. It completely overwhelmed me and I was unable to tear myself away. It's so much more than you think it is and I can not get enough of this world Hall has built. Fans of Gideon the Ninth should run, not walk, to grab this one. Holy shit, what a book

Originally posted on The Nerd Daily: https://thenerddaily.com/review-star-eater-by-kerstin-hall/

Kerstin Hall’s debut novel is a stunning adult dark fantasy filled with brutal magic, cannibal nuns, and a corrupt government willing to do whatever is necessary to maintain control.

Elfreda Raughn never wanted to be part of the Sisterhood. But like those before her, she was born into it. Now, she eats her mother’s flesh to preserve her magic and maintain the Pillars that keep their city floating over the dead world below. But what really terrifies Elfreda is the ritual to continue the bloodline. Once she gets pregnant the countdown to martyrdom begins. And the monthly ritual isn’t one she can easily escape.

Desperate for options, Elfreda jumps at the chance to join a group of rebels who believe there is a better way. As their spy, she discovers more secrets and conspiracies than she ever dreamed possible. Including one about her. The closer she gets to the truth, the more her enemies close in trying to silence her once and for all.

To put it succinctly, Star Eater is a stunningly beautiful nightmare. It’s dark and gory, filled with vivid hallucinations that weave into the book’s reality making it difficult to know what’s real and what isn’t. This blurred line makes the story feel like a lucid dream, made even more surreal by the way Hall expertly weaves all five senses into her writing. This isn’t a book you simply read, it’s one you experience.

One of the things Hall does so fantastically throughout the novel is take elements that are easily recognisable from our world and adding facets of the unknown to them. This builds a lush background for the fantastic, but it serves to keep us off-kilter. Throughout the novel it’s easy to get wrapped into believing Elfreda lives in what could be any Victorian city in any fantasy novel. But right when we feel comfortable, Hall shakes the ground beneath our feet. It’s this very act of firmly rooting us in a world we are familiar with that allows Hall to push us into the extraordinary in so many other ways.

Elfreda is part of the Order. A sisterhood of nuns that inherit magic through eating their mother’s flesh. This magic creates lace, a sort of spiderweb type substance that can be used to hold people in place but is largely used to capture Haunts­­—men who have been infected with magic and turn into zombie like creatures with endless hunger. This infection is sexually transmitted, which is dark on its own. But couple that with the fact that in order to continue the Sisterhood, they have to get pregnant, and things get even darker.

Rather than infect innocent men, the Order simply keeps the Haunts they capture in a prison where they’re used for the carefully controlled monthly ceremonies. The implications of body autonomy go both ways here. The men are manipulated magically, and the nuns aren’t given much of choice in the matter either. It’s a grim reality that highlights the way power of this matriarchal society is abused on multiple levels.

Elfreda hates the ceremony and is terrified of becoming pregnant. Choice isn’t an option for her or any of the nuns. They’re expected to reproduce, to be martyred, to continue the power the Star grants them. And there is nothing they can do about it. The nuns may be the ruling class in this society, but very few of them have control over anything, including their own bodies. They’re tested regularly to ensure they aren’t doing anything to prevent or end a pregnancy, and though they’re provided counselling for the trauma, they are never released from it. It’s a brutal condemnation of power and how easily it is abused in order to be maintained.

This searing indictment on how twisted and rotten the heart of the Order is, becomes clearer as Elfreda learns more of their secrets and the truth of their history. Power corrupts and absolute power mutates into something monstrous. Since the Sisterhood is essentially a religion, complete with practiced rituals to appease the Star, they use fear to subjugate the entire population. Hall gives us an interesting glimpse into how mythology can be perpetuated and forgotten at the same time, underlining how even the tenets of faith can be rewritten by the victors. Most of the Order is willing to do anything to maintain their power, even when presented with hope for a different reality. At what point does belief turn into fanaticism? Hall doesn’t give us the answer, but she does offer the question for the reader to ponder.

Hall paints a world built to show us how complex and complicated our own world is. On the surface, Haunts are the only monsters. But in fact, Star Eater is filled with them. Some are the Haunts, the men infected with magic, creating an endless blood-thirsty hunger for lace. Some are regular people pushed to hatred through an oppressive regime. And some are the more frightening variety. The ones we see in government today, grabbing power and letting it poison them until little of their humanity remains. This may be set in a far different world than the one we live in today, but the core is so similar it’s terrifying.

This grim realism makes the tension palpable throughout the book. The more we learn with Elfreda, the more heartbreaking her reality becomes. And the higher the stakes get. Every scene is filled with some sense of dread and foreboding, and Hall’s ability to bring lurid dreamscapes to life keeps the reader constantly off-balance, never knowing what to expect next. It serves the plot well, propelling us through the pages and into an explosive but startlingly quiet end.

Star Eater is not going to be every reader’s cup of flesh. It’s violent and gory, filled with dark and heavy themes, and readers should familiarise themselves with the content warnings before proceeding. It falls firmly in the horror and dark fantasy spectrum and will appeal to those readers. There is a lot of body horror and graphic imagery used to delve into grief, regret, fear, and loss. It’s horrifying and tender, exposing the complicated nuance of life in wildly imaginative ways.

But this layered approach means that Hall doesn’t hold the reader’s hand through the story. There are some clues to how the world operates along with the unfolding mystery that are incredibly subtle. They can be easy to miss or misunderstand. However, the lush descriptions and intense imagery encourage a closer read. This is a book to fall into completely and entirely, and fans will find new perspectives and details to revel in with every read through.

Star Eater is described as “a phantasmagorical indictment of hereditary power” and it absolutely lives up to every word. It explores power and how power corrupts, but at its core, this is a book about how to choose your own life in a world that wants to rip choice away entirely. It’s a powerful debut bringing a strange, twisted lucidity to the dark fantasy genre.

This is a dark book. I enjoyed it, it is a very dark exploration of women's rights and the autonomy they have over their bodies. The world was lush in description and the story is haunting.

Published June 22, 2021 by Tordotcom

“All martyrdoms are difficult.”

So reads the tagline of Kerstin Hall’s latest novel, a gripping exploration of power and agency within oppressive systems.

Elfreda Raughn has a problem. A member of a magical Sisterhood, it’s her duty to maintain order and keep Aytrium floating upon the magical pillars that the Star Eater established a millennia ago—lest the city crash into the abyss of monstrous Haunts below. It’s the duty of every Sister to produce a daughter who will one day devour her mother in search of magical power. Conception is ritualized and abortion is forbidden. Terrified of falling pregnant, Elfreda wants out at any cost. Blackmailed into assisting a shadowy rebellion, she gains access to both the highest levels of the Sisterhood and the complex mysteries surrounding the Star Eater.

A story of monsters, ritual, and the weight of obligation in the face of love, Star Eater begins with a deceptively conventional opening before shifting into something stranger and much more interesting. Featuring a complex system of magic, belief, and the varying intersections of faith and ritual, Star Eater’s one flaw might be combining too many characters and plot elements into a single storyline. It’s a difficult balancing act to handle a conspiracy, a murder mystery, and a chosen-one narrative on top of an incredibly complex system of magic and worldbuilding. And, to Star Eater’s credit, it’s a balance the story mostly manages to strike. The characters have enough breathing room to develop, the world of Aytrium reveals itself in intriguing ways through both the mundane and the utterly strange, and it avoids falling into the more common pitfalls of modern horror fiction. The story feels lived in without needlessly info-dumping, though there is one moment toward the middle involving details of the magic system that would have benefitted from some fleshing out before it became an important plot element instead of being revealed in-scene the moment it becomes relevant.

I have to admit that I’m a hard sell on first-person narratives. Call it a stylistic preference. I’m happy to report that Elfreda makes for an intriguing narrator, balancing the line between absorbing introspection while never getting too quick or too slow to pick up on the plot twists. It’s a difficult balance to strike, but one that Hall handles masterfully. Star Eater’s emotional arc concerns Elfreda’s relationship with three other characters; siblings Finn and Millie, both of whom Elfreda has known since childhood and has complicated romantic feelings for, and her mother, Kirane, who has since been martyred and left alive only so the other Sisters can devour her body to increase their own magical power.

I am also a hard sell on love triangles. To Hall’s credit, she doesn’t shy away from exploring the complexities of love under these circumstances, both familiar and romantic, and how the characters compromise and change in order to survive an imperfect world. Elfreda is flawed and her power makes her dangerous, as does her participation in a system that oppresses the people around her. Her journey from reluctant but willing participant to active rebellion comes organically, in fits and starts as she swings from acting out of self-preservation to genuinely believing change is possible, and with more than a few twists I didn’t see coming. And while the ending hits quickly, it does so in a way that ties all the narrative threads together in a neat, cohesive whole.

Star Eater’s deceptively conventional opening implies a far more mundane story with a love triangle and a murder mystery that I’d seen many times before. But the actual story is interested in deeper and stranger questions about human nature, how people endure under oppression, and the power of belief in the face of overwhelming odds, and far more interesting. It is also extremely, enthusiastically, queer. I highly recommend it.

A riveting and extremely intriguing book from the very beginning.

Not what I thought it would be in terms of plot - as it looks very space-opera inspired, especially with the twitter rumours it was cannibals in space. What actually turned up was a page-burning and exciting read that really pulled on my heart strings in places.

Would recommend.

If you are in the market for something different, Star Eater by Kerstin Hall has you covered. Set in a grimdark world, the book is about an authoritarian and aristocratic order of nuns that consumes the flesh of their order members to maintain superpowers similar to Spider-man. So, it’s certainly different from anything else I have read recently. It has a lot of creativity in its corner, but under its inventive concept sits a stereotypical dystopian YA novel that uses gore and edge to masquerade as adult SFF. By this I mean: the worldbuilding is thin, the plot feels rudimentary and focused on shock over substance, the characters have personalities based on tropes, and there is a love triangle.

The book follows Elfreda Raughn, a Sister of Aytrium and one of the de facto leaders of this civilization despite her youth. Elfreda feels trapped and confined to the terrible fate of the sisterhood – to live her life on a knife’s edge until her power overwhelms her, wherein she will be literally eaten by her fellow Sisters so that they can absorb her strength. To give Star Eater credit, I think it does a good job of exploring this core tenet of its story. Elfreda’s fear of death feels real and warranted, and her deteriorating mental state over the course of the book, as she wrestles with her role in society, does a good job raising poignant concerns about what it means to be a mother in the modern era. Is her body a commodity that can be traded? Why is it ok for society to pressure her into giving up everything to continue on a bloodline she isn’t invested in? I liked these themes and Star Eater has some interesting arguments and parallels to the real world. That being said, there isn’t a lot here other than these core themes.

The worldbuilding in Star Eater is bad. It took me almost 80% of the book to even slightly understand how life works in Aytrium. Technology levels are very confusing. I never understood how advanced civilization was and what the characters do and don’t have access to. We spend huge portions of time in what feels like a medieval era, and then a character will call a cab. Without a decent understanding of how the world worked, and the challenges that Elfreda couldn’t overcome, it was hard to buy into the various conflicts.

One plot element that takes up a large amount of page space is how sex with the Sisterhood works. If a Sister has sex with a woman, nothing bad happens – so we have a ton of gay Spider-man cannibals running around, which is a cool ass sentence. But, if a sister has sex with a man, she has a high chance of passing a magical STD to him that turns him slowly into an immortal insane serial killing demigod that can only be killed by literally throwing him off the edge of the world. Hopefully, this plot point helps demonstrate another problem with the story, the worldbuilding can be really weirdly specific in order to service the immediate plot.

Now this plot point by itself is fine, but the Sisterhood, concerned with creating too many male demi-problems, uses a breeding program with condemned criminals to impregnate younger members of the Sisterhood to continue their bloodline (which is how their magic is passed down). So we have a double sexual assault, in which both parties are vehemently against the sex but are being forced to do it by a third external party – and I hate it. Elfreda spends a lot of the book doing anything she can to get out of this ‘duty,’ a reaction I relate to enormously. While it was interesting to read her psychological struggles, I did not enjoy this plot point at all.

On top of all of this, there is a terrible love triangle between Elfreda and two siblings of opposite genders. She spends a lot of the book trying to decide between being with a woman who she loves with no downside or being with a man she loves while endangering the lives of literally everyone around her at all times, with no way to choose between them – which feels ridiculous and selfish given the context. Generally, the characters are all weak. They mostly feel vapid and shallow and usually only get a single defining feature to their personality. This is not a character-driven story.

Despite my obvious reservations with Star Eater, I do respect it for being original in a sea of sameness. If it did a little bit better at more concrete worldbuilding and adding more depth to its cast, I think it could have been a very exciting read. But, in its current state it feels like a YA book that is just a little too edgy for my taste.

Rating: Star Eater – 4.5/10
-Andrew

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Imaginative and well paced story that suffers from what appears to be not incredible editing. Most of the issues I had with the book were related to lack of clear setup of the worldbuilding and magic, which could have easily been added in edits. Either way, the book is great and I will definitely be recommending it to customers.

The Star Eater lifted a city into the sky for protection, but no one explained it was the Sisterhood they needed protection from. After a few brutal murders and the start of a resistance, the Sisterhood seems to be wavering. Cannibalism, queer nuns, violent infected men, and the one woman that could fix everything.

Gender binary is necessary in this world, but I'd be interested to see how nonbinary and transgenders would mess up that strict black and whiteness.

Side thoughts:
Why didn't the sisters just use donor sperm instead of purposely infecting males?

CW: abortion and child loss, ceremonial rape

Star Eater is an incredibly imaginative fantasy, probably the most original fantasy that I’ve read in a while. There’s so much to like about this book. The world is fully realized and the politics are complex. I enjoyed the scheming and the different political factions involved and I think the political aspects were the strongest parts of the story. I liked how in the first half of the book, El was a spy sent on secret missions to uncover what the enemy was doing. The subterfuge was highly entertaining.

Additionally, the action scenes raised my pulse, particularly one of the action scenes set at an abandoned castle on top of a hill. Both the lace and haunts were fascinating aspects of the story. I also liked the themes this story dealt with such as the corruption of power and tradition. There were a few things that prevented this from being a five star read for me though. There were a lot of characters in the book and most of them felt quite flat. While I liked the idea behind the romance I felt it was underdeveloped. Lastly, the ending was a bit predictable and underwhelming. But these are just minor things and overall Star Eater is a meticulously crafted, original and engrossing story.

Star Eater is fantastically imaginative, a  cannibalistic sisterhood where magic is passed from mother to daughter through the act of consuming one's mother, and where men turn into monsters if they have sex with a member of the sisterhood due to a curse. It's a horrifying world, to be honest. Women are forced to rape men in order to bear daughters who will follow in their mother's footsteps, new sisters trapped within the order. And the whole time, women know they will randomly be martyred, wherein they will be put to sleep, their bodies preserved so that their daughters can cut little pieces of them off in order to weild magic known as lace.

Like I said, it's an interesting premise and a world I'd love to explore more, but the protagonist Elfreda did little for me. She came across as very sheltered within her little world. If something didn't effect her personally, she paid it no mind. Her romance with Finn seemed unnecessary and lukewarm. I thought it was strange that several characters were presented as bisexual but there was no real discussion of queer people within the sisterhood or the regular civilians.

There was also an interesting moment about colonialism, the conquering of other societies and the stealing of power, and the whitewashing of the sisterhood's history, but it happened at the very end of the book and Elfreda only spent a moment feeling bad about it. She seemed more concerned with her friends thinking poorly of her than in any injustice done toward the original Star and its people. I would have loved to see more of that pre-ascention history and how the original Star and its people had lived prior to the rise of the sisterhood.

Overall, Star Eater was intense and in several ways horrifying. It's got an interesting premise, but it felt a little lacking in some areas. I have questions about the world that I would have loved to see explored more, and while I enjoyed Millie and Osan, and the relationship between Asan and Rhyanon, I felt Elfreda fell a little flat.

Kerstin Hall is back with a novel like no other. Star Eater promises to find a way to merge science fiction, horror, nuns, and cannibalism. Yes, you read that right.

Elfreda Raughn is an involuntary member of the Sisterhood of Aytrium. She wants out. She wants out so bad; she'll take any opportunity that comes her way – even if the odds of failure (and thus, death) are high.

Offered the promise of escape, Elfreda doesn't think twice about becoming a spy against the Sisterhood. Yet, she'll quickly learn that this world is so much more complex and horrifying than she had ever prepared herself for.

Okay, we all knew that I was going to read Star Eater, right? How could I not, given everything that it promises? I know I'm not the only one that was super curious about what Kerstin Hall had to offer here.

The fact that I've literally never read anything like this is awe-inspiring. Star Eater is in a league of its own. I imagine that this will result in some people either loving or hating it. Before deciding how you feel on the matter, consider some content warnings for this book. One of them should be obvious: cannibalism. There's also implied rape, plus the concern of pregnancy (which is implied to be obligatory).

I'm honestly not sure that many authors could have pulled this story off, truth be told. Yet Kerstin Hall's writing style is perfect for it – even the more graphic and horrifying elements. In a way, this kind of reminded me of some of the darker stories to come out of Warhammer 40K. That is to say; I really dug it.

Thanks to Tor.com and #NetGalley for making this book available for review. All opinions expressed are my own.

I am very conflicted by this book. Mostly because I wasnt expecting this to be like this... I thought it would be a little different but this is a very dark book. It is written very well, however maybe just not for me.

Elfreda Raughn wants nothing more than to leave the nightmare that is the Sisterhood of Aytrium. Pregnancy is a fear among the Sisterhood; their obligation is to perform sexual intercourse with the Haunts, infected men who are then tossed from the edge of the floating city. Pregnancy means maintaining the Sisterhood’s bloodline, but Elfreda desires freedom. Her mother has been martyred, her flesh to be consumed in pieces by the Sisterhood. When given the chance to escape, Elfreda eventually goes for it. Now she’s a spy for a rebel group, and her new access to the luxury and privilege of the Sisterhood provides a glimpse into the corruption in Aytrium.

Star Eater explores power and choice through the social statuses and districts of Aytrium. The discussions involving power dynamics and what one has to sacrifice to achieve the highest position are well nuanced. Hall knows what she’s doing with her world and characters. Elfreda’s narrative arc naturally acclimates; her character development stems from her actions instead of convenient plot points. The story provides enough space between major scenes for essential world-building and character dynamics. Plus, Hall’s imagination has no restraints. In Aytrium, there are giant cats (to ride on like horses!) and a magic system involving a form of lacework.

Hall’s gorgeous prose evokes a sense of place, utilizing metaphors to elevate her scenes and characterization. She gives enough details to create a clear image of the world without bombarding her audience with extraneous parts. The violence and cannibalism in this world do not veer into gratuitous or sensational territory.

As another reviewer stated, this book had a remarkably small amount of flesh eating and religious description background than I would have expected going into a book talking about religious cannibalism, necromancy, and a floating nun-cannibal-powered island in the sky …

I definitely didn’t hate it, but there were many lagging moments. I would say the second half gave me much more of what I needed to feel compelled, propelled, and intrigued, while the first half was a bit too much of not much.

This was a mish mash of the necromantic-death-nun-elements of Tamsyn Muir’s “Gideon the Ninth” mixed with every fantasy kingdom saga story of power-play-who-will/deserves-to-rule.

That second half and ending though, chef’s kiss. A brilliantly fascinating world that I really did want to know more about, which is never a bad thing for a fantasy writer. And talk about female power, this book has all of the female power ever, good and bad!

This book feels like a metaphor in search of a meaning. There's a lot of gorgeous, elaborate, haunting imagery, but it's ultimately not put in service to anything besides a ho-hum quest story. I almost wrote down "coming-of-age" there for quest but the protagonist is ostensibly twenty-two years old, even though she acts much younger.

Said protagonist is Elfreda Raughm, an Acolyte in the Sisterhood that rules Aytrium (which is undoubtedly the most weirdly banal name for a fantasy planet I've ever read. "Atrium to where?" I kept wondering.) The Sisterhood is almost as much fussy bureaucracy as it is an organization of the genetically exalted. The Sisters can manipulate an energy called Lace into doing various body-centered acts of telekinesis and telepathy. In order to do so, however, they have to consume the flesh of other Sisters, usually their own mothers kept in a stasis called Martyrdom (there's something vague inserted here about keeping the bloodlines pure or something.)

El hates having to feed off slivers of her comatose Mom but she hates having to go through Renewal even more. In order to keep the bloodlines going, Sisters are required to mate, but any man who has sex with a Sister runs a high risk of turning into an immortal zombie-demon. So male criminals are telepathically coerced into having sex with specially purified Sisters -- it's as awful as it sounds -- then when the illness that turns them into immortal zombie-demons takes hold, are thrown off the edge of the world into the Void. The flip side of this, ofc, is that Sisters basically can't have heterosexual relationships, not without eventually unleashing a monster on the populace.

So that's all pretty cool, but it's turned to the service of a story that's not only fairly basic, but also populated by a whole lot of cardboard characters. Worse, the details of, oh gosh, nearly everything are kept deliberately vague. There's this sense of Motherhood killing the Sisters but there are not only a ton of older Sisters, there are also a bunch of Sisters busy raising their own daughters (their sons are taken away and killed, however.)

And that's the main trouble with Star Eater: this book is essentially "what if reverse sexism?" which is SUCH a snoozefest that also makes no room, in this novel at least, for nonbinary or trans people. And don't get me started on the "what if heterosexuality was the love that dare not speak it's name?" Fucking yawn. It's an adolescent mind experiment which, at best, might elicit sympathy from cis straight people who "never thought of it that way" (in this day and age!) There's also an attempt at "colonizers bad!" towards the end to which, yes, but just devolving power the way the book does isn't an automatic panacea, especially since El's big "sacrifice" seems to be purely symbolic. How has the status quo changed? Who now holds the power? Is Lace even a thing any more? How was Lace even a thing to begin with? What is the entire deal with the Star?!

So many questions! I wanted to know so much more about the cannibal nuns and their magic system and history, preferably separate from the dire El. Granted, she was pretty interesting for the first three-quarters of the book or so but then she turned into an angsty adolescent, with her spunky best friend and her self-sacrificing love interest. And just, God, the nonsense about not leaving people behind in a firefight. I'm too irritated to go into military tactics and philosophy right now but it made my blood boil to see the way covering a retreat was uniformly treated as cowardice by the evacuating instead of courageous (and almost always necessary!) on the part of the covering soldiers. But then, the book had a tendency to wallow in the feelings of "victims" rather than in acknowledging and celebrating people's strengths and choices, which is truly bizarre from a book that's ostensibly pro-choice (but totally in keeping with the rest of the book's clumsy handling of anything remotely approaching empathy and selflessness.)

Ugh, the more I write, the more I remember the things that really didn't make sense about this book. Genuinely bizarre that a book about body horror and grotesque visions grossed me out more for the pedestrian YA storyline and angst than for any of the horror trappings.

Star Eater by Kerstin Hall was published June 22 2021 by tordotcom and is available from all good booksellers, including <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/15382/9781250625311">Bookshop!</a>

3.5 stars
Star Eater is unlike anything I’ve ever read before. From a kingdom floating in the sky to zombie-like creatures to cannibal nuns… it’s a lot to take in! And Hall did a wonderful job of incorporating these elements to tell an original, fresh story.

Star Eater follows our protagonist, Elfreda Raughn, a member of the Sisterhood who starts to work as a double agent. She soon uncovers a conspiracy that will change the way she views the world.

The pacing was a little on the slow side. It took me a while to fully understand the world-building and magic system. Because of this, my enjoyment lessened; I was trying so hard to fit the puzzle pieces together. However, the pacing did get better after the halfway mark and I found myself flying through the novel. That being said, the magic system was so original and dark. It intrigued yet disgusted me.

In terms of the characters, I did root for them but I felt that Elfreda was kind of bland with not a lot of character development until the very end. I enjoyed reading from her POV regardless. Additionally, I wasn’t too convinced when it came to the romance because it came out of left field with no development.

Overall, this was a solid book. I enjoyed the plot and world-building but the pacing fell a bit short. Otherwise, I recommend if you’re looking for a dark, brutal book with an interesting magic system.

I was so excited for this book, as soon as I read 'cannibal nuns' I just knew I had to read it. And while there were parts about this book I definitely enjoyed, the ending really let it down and just made the rest of the book seem kind of pointless.

Elfreda is a Sister of Aytrium, gifted with magic passed down through bloodlines. It is not a life she wants, nor would she wish it on anybody else, so when she is approached by a shadowy group of sisters asking her to spy on the highest reaches of the Sisterhood she jumps at the chance to learn more about her history and that of Aytrium. But the more Elfreda looks, the more she realises that the Sisterhood may have been built on a lie, one that has been killing both sisters and men alike, and one that through sacrifice Elfreda may just be able to end.

Hall brings us a fantastic bunch of characters in Star Eater. Through Elfreda we get a deep look into the Sisterhood, as well as seeing her life outside with friends she has grown up with, and though they all have a massive part to play in the story, Star Eater is most definitely Elfreda's story. She has grown up knowing the fate that awaits her, knowing that once she has a child her life span is greatly lessened. She has always dreamed of a simple life, one like her friends, but knows that it's just not meant to be. I'm not sure whether I would have her strength in light of what awaits her, she is incredibly resilient &amp; willing to do whatever it takes to make the world a better place for everyone in it.

The world of Star Eater is unlike anything I have ever read before. The Sisterhood of Aytrium was founded when the first Sister's ate a star, something that granted them the power of 'Lace', and now they eat their own to continue the line and power. But all power comes with a cost, having sex with a Sister will cause a man to become a Haunt, something that hunts for the flesh of the sisters, so to ensure the continuation of the line they force the sisters to lie with Prisoners, ensuring they are dealt with after the fact. While I found this all really intriguing and different, I just felt like it wasn't quite built well enough for me to get a full grasp on things. I constantly felt that I was 2 steps behind the MC when things would happen, and I didn't even know they lived on a flying Island until the last 15% of the book.

Star Eater is definitely not for the faint of heart. There are some graphic descriptions of cannibalism, as well as talk of forced sex, but I knew going in that this would be a dark book and these scenes just added to the creepiness of the overall story. I do think Hall's descriptions were slightly lacking at some points, there were times when I had to re-read scenes a few times to get a proper grasp on what was happening, and the pacing of the book was also a little off. We spend the first 75% of the book learning about the Sisterhood, as well as the people out to stop it and then we get a big revelation, there's a minor battle and then it just ended. I would have liked more of an explanation for the revelation, as well as a better understanding of it.

Now for the ending. I buddy read this with Susan and we had very similar reactions to reading it which were basically what have I just read. As I said above we had a lot of build up to the ending, waring Sisterhood factions, a rebellion wanting to bring it down, as well as a people who had been lied to their whole lives and it ends with a dream/hallucination and then a seemingly happy ending with no real repercussions. It all just seemed way to easy to me, and I felt a little let down after picking a side in the fight to learn that no one really took the blame in any way.

Would I recommend this? Yes, I loved the characters as well as learning all about the religion/culture, but it would most definitely come with a warning to not expect too much out of the ending. I think this is a book that may have been better as a duology as there was a lot of unanswered questions and things left open at the end, and I would have liked to see the repercussions for the Sisterhood after lying to the people of Aytrium for so long.

I really likes the characters and the concept of this book. The world and the horror filled magic system were very original. I would have loved to have had a map so I knew where the many locations they travel were located and a Prologue telling me about how the Star Eater came to be and how she ascended Aytrium into the sky. I think that's what the origin is, I pieced that together form little pieces throughout the book. I'm still a little fuzzy on it though.

Overall, super unique and interesting. I'd read more books set in this world now that I know what's going on.