By Lexi Ryan

“Princess Jasalyn has a secret. Armed with an enchanted ring that gives her death’s kiss, Jas has been sneaking away from the palace at night to assassinate her enemies. Shape-shifter Felicity needs a miracle. Fated to kill her magical father, she’s been using her unique ability to evade a fatal prophecy. When rumors of evil king Mordeus’s resurrection spread through the shadow court, Jasalyn decides to end him once and for all. Felicity agrees to take the form of the princess, allowing Jas to covertly hunt Mordeus—and starting Felicity on the path that could finally take her home. While Jasalyn teams up with the charming and handsome Kendrick, Felicity sets out to get closer to the Wild Fae king, Misha. Kendrick helps Jasalyn feel something other than anger for the first time in three years, and Misha makes Felicity wish for a world where she’s free to be her true self. Soon, the girls’ missions are at risk right alongside their hearts. The future of the human and fae realms hangs in the balance as fates intertwine. Between perilous tasks, grim secrets, and forbidden romances, Jasalyn and Felicity find that perhaps their stars are the most cursed of all” (Goodreads).

This wasn’t a bad way to try pulling myself out of the reading slump, but it wasn’t exactly my favorite book either. I should’ve known better, as I’ve become quite disenfranchised with the new “romantasy” genre in general, but I’m a sucker for a Charlie Bowater-type cover. So we’re gonna use Beneath These Cursed Stars to try out yet another new review format.

I thought the plot was actually really interesting and moved along well. There were a couple times in the middle where it felt as though the characters in both POVs were just going through day to day life and falling in love with their boys without thinking about their goals very much. However, I truly did want to understand the mysteries introduced and see if the character’s plans succeeded. The author did well in raising the stakes and making the reader care. One of my problems with romantasy is that often the plot seems secondary to the romance, but that didn’t seem to be the case here.

I actually loved the style of the book! Dual POVs can add a lot of complexity to a story and expand the narrative lens, but for those who enjoy the romance a little more, it also serves to include two romance arcs in one book ;)… The author did well with the timing of POV shifts, breaking up long or boring sequences and providing information on one character’s situation through what was happening to the other.

I did think Felicity’s POV felt a little bit unnecessary at times, however, or that she was just a plot device to pull Jasalyn’s story forward. Part of that was because she was disguised as Jasalyn the whole time and getting flashbacks to Jasalyn’s memories, so it almost felt like just another Jasalyn. We didn’t get to see much of her personality because she was always acting like someone else. That could have been intentional though – maybe in the next book her identity will be explored more.

I did take a bit off of my rating, however, because when I started reading Beneath These Cursed Stars, I thought it was a sequel and I had missed the first book. The world explanations, lore, and even characters are introduced as if they’re being quickly recapped. I realized that was because it’s a spin-off from the author’s duology These Hollow Vows, but the “you should already know this stuff” vibe kind of put me off.

In a fantasy, you can usually expect the female main characters to be pretty cookie-cutter, but Jasalyn seemed, happily, a little more realistic than I was expecting. The added dimension of her dungeon and torture trauma was represented well, and I liked how the flashbacks throughout the book helped to show the huge impact that experience had on her identity. I felt that her pre-dungeon backstory was not explained well, however. It seemed as though, once again, the author was hoping that readers had read her previous duology and already had a basic understanding of Jasalyn and her relationships to those around her.

Felicity, on the other hand, was not fleshed out very thoroughly. Because she spent the whole book pretending to be someone else, her personality didn’t really get a chance to show through. Her motivations were very clear: her desire to remove her father from power and avoid destroying her brother in the process. This clarity gives me hope that her character will be explored more in the future. Even with a confusion of personality, I still empathized with her even more than I did with Jasalyn. Falling in love with a man who seems to be falling for the woman she is disguised as is such a sad situation, and it created a really interesting and dynamic internal struggle. As she falls deeper for Misha, she wrestles with her priorities and the knowledge that he wants Jasalyn, not Felicity.

As for the leading men, I would say that Misha could have used some more screen time that wasn’t related to Felicity. It kind of felt like he wouldn’t have passed the Bechdel test but like… gender swapped. We got to see Hale interacting with many other characters – from his friends to enemies – and not just about Jasalyn. Misha kind of just barely talked to other royalty/old fae types, and always with Felicity nearby. Otherwise, both men’s backstories and characterizations were well done. They did both kind of have some weird age-gap-type relations to the main women. Misha seems to be centuries older than Felicity, because he’s fae or something (I’m not actually sure how that works because again, the author seems to think the reader already knows everything about the world and how faeries work)? But that’s forgivable, you see it a lot in romantasies. Jasalyn’s man was a little creepier: Hale knew Jasalyn when she was a skinny little 14 year old and he was 17 – which isn’t that bad on it’s own, but she keeps referencing that he must be looking at her differently now that she’s older because she’s “filled out” and got “curves.” Which felt strange.

And that brings me to probably the thing I hated most about this book: almost every character could just not stop talking about Jasalyn’s body. If you imagine the most infuriating “oops I’m pretty” YA character, she would look exactly like that. She is very petite (she leaves quite an impression – five feet to be exact (hehe)) and “parts of her filled out” while other parts “stayed skinny.” As both main-character males, Felicity, and Jasalyn herself are constantly reminding the reader, Jasalyn has all the right stuff in the all the right places, and consider it her very best feature. The two main romances would have been a lot more adorable if they weren’t so heavily based on lust over personality attraction. I definitely prefer books where the characters are friends first and then lovers, for this very reason.

Outside of the main four characters, the side characters were not very well fleshed out. Jasalyn’s sister and her consort were barely referenced, and when they were it seemed the author was once again relying on the reader’s supposed knowledge of her previous books to support their characters. The usual token gay couple and emo tough girl were discussed a lot, but their characters didn’t get any deeper than their outside personas.

Overall, I would give this book 3.5 stars. It felt like a very basic 2024 faerie romance, and the “these adjective dramatic noun” YA title certainly didn’t help. Despite this, I can still say I was entertained. I enjoyed the slow burn of the two main romances and the way the plot was developed, switching between POVs.