⭐️⭐️ / 2 stars
Curse of the Stars is a story set in 1900s London, where Melody starts at Darkgrove Academy and meets a group of Cult members enrolled at the Academy.

I was contacted by the author if I was interested in reading and reviewing her book, as I had not heard of it before she contacted me. I was intrigued by the synopsis and cover of this book.

Unfortunately, this book just didn’t seem like my cup of tea. It has a lot of potential to be a really good book, but for me it just didn’t do it. A lot of it didn’t have to do with the writing itself, as it was a pleasantly written book, but with what was written. I had a hard time connecting to the plot and characters and thus didn’t really enjoy it.

One of the stumbling points for me was the world-building and how it was poorly explained. In the beginning, the writing was done with lots of details such as “lavender-scented sheets” and “burgundy carpet”, but with how poorly explained everything was it just seemed as if it was written like that to give the book more dept and cover up for the fact that it lacked explanation. For example, Melody goes to this Academy, but what for? Is it like high school? College? What does she study? All these things could’ve easily been explained but weren’t. The magic seems to work because of rituals, but how does that work? Where do they learn these rituals? How is the magic inside people noticed?

The same problem was with the overall plotline. I’ve finished this book, but still don’t understand what happened and why it all did. The group was working towards something or preventing something, but why? A lot of things just kept happening and I just didn’t understand why.

The synopsis also says the story takes place in 1900s London. The only points which made that clear were the dates mentioned above some chapters. The clothing wasn’t really described in great detail a lot of the time, so I don’t know if the women wore trousers or skirts. Also, they fought with knives all the time, but guns already existed so that makes it seem as if it should’ve been further back in time?

I just couldn’t really follow along all that well with what was happening. Now, I don’t know if this next point is because of the formatting of the book, but the switching in POV’s were really confusing as well. The whole book is written in third point of view, but in the middle of chapters with the start of the next alinea the focus would suddenly shift between different characters who were at different locations. This became really confusing, as it wasn’t always noticeable immediately and I sometimes had to reread passages and alinea’s to understand about which characters I was reading, which didn’t help with connecting to the story or enjoying it.

The characters themselves also didn’t connect with me. They came across as quite shallow and two dimensional. You only learn about surface points and not really what drives them or what motivates them. I would’ve liked it if they had more dept and more character growth throughout this story. Whenever something bad happened, I just didn’t feel anything like shock or something or wanted them to be okay. It just was a feeling like “okay, next” and that is a pity.

The romance was also something I wasn’t a fan of. Overall, I don’t really like insta-love type of relationship developments and that was really the case with Melody and Elliot. Their chemistry and growing feelings for each other weren’t really read about, which made the relationship not really believable in my eyes.

Spoiler

The same could be said about Rosalie and Nick. She had been in love with Melody for years and suddenly she can forget all about her and start feeling for Nick in what felt like a few days? That would never happen in real life like that I believe, so their relationship just seemed fake.

Overall, the book had a lot of potential and I think it can be really good if more attention is given to the explanation of plot points.