@@ReadswithRachel thank you so much! You're a HUGE inspiration for me getting started to be honest, I love your candor and the way you advocate for good books for readers
It's so easy to makes this sentence better too like " She ran as if her own shadow plotted her death" like that indicates so much more of what the character is feeling/ thinking. Like intense fear of imaginary foes or that she's so paranoid even her shadow seems like an enemy she can't escape from.
@@ReadswithRachel It also gets on my nervous when adults say they read YA because it's "simple". It's not simple, the stories are complex for the audience that it's designed for. I think adults who read YA for leisure should try novellas bc they aren't getting what they need from YA.
I don't understand why people think like this about YA. Theme-wise sure, things are made to be understood for the age bracket but that doesn't make the book overall "simple". Even Amari and The Night Brothers, which is middle grade, is not a book I'd call "simple". It's written to be understood by a middle grade audience but still has complexity in it's worldbuilding and character arcs and themes.
@@ReadswithRachel Exactly! I salute authors who write for children because as adults we are so far removed from the troubles of children, especially since we have an emotional depth they lack. It's an insult to these authors and books like LightLark are an insult to the genre of YA. I think the Godling Chronicles are YA and that book series is a wonderful read lol. The opening is by far the best opening I've ever read for a story.
I think people forget what types of books teens are assigned to read in school. Teenagers are perfectly capable of reading and understanding books intended for adults, the draw of YA is the relatable characters and themes.
the thing is, Aster is apparently indigenous Colombian. It's incredibly sad she doesn't even recognize how she's disrespecting her own heritage. (And dumb tbh)@@darthbr3nnan
I ah....was not prepared for the character art where everyone looks 16 years old and like they've never been troubled by more than a late chemistry paper or a chipped nail.
Intro to Grim in book 1: gives her chocolate which scares her because shes not supposed to eat anything but hearts but he already knows she doesnt eat hearts Book 2: The Wildlings have a chef! And patisserier! They love chocolate!
From another review of the first book - I think that Grim asks her if she likes chocolate and she says she could eat heaps of it, so I don't think it's a scary proposition, and she definitely has had chocolate before. It isn't explained how this jives with Wildlings "living exclusively on human hearts" - maybe they can eat other food but get no sustenance from it? Not that the 1 human heart/month diet for Wildlings ever made any sense. 12 humans per year per Wildling? Do these have to be adult hearts? The logistics are just insane.
@@godminnette2 given the fact it was stablished Isla gets 1 heart every night for dinner. It seems the "feeds exclusively on human hearts" is very literal
@@Fischohnerad17 well guess now we just need a 4th book after titled something Moon related. and a 5th with Wild in the title and all four clans have their bases covered with a book title.
Wouldn't it have made more sense to have had Oro and Isla have a previous relationship, that Grim made both her and Oro forget so he could make Isla fall in love with him instead. I don't even like romance books but that makes more sense than having Grim flirt with Isla constantly when he's the one who took her memories for seemingly no reason.
Yeah fr! I’ve always been a big fan of any memory loss trope, but the way Lightlark handles it is frankly embarrassing. I need to memory loss my way out of the summary to save my sanity
I ranted about this in someone else’s review of _Nightbane,_ but in my opinion, transitioning the Wildling people from an all-heart diet to a regular food diet is a far more complex and interesting plot idea than whatever _Nightbane_ is about. Didn’t Wildlings only have to eat a few times a week or month? I would be so mad if I went from being able to subsist on one heart a week to having to eat three times a day.
it would be such a good way to introduce a self-indulgent cooking subplot too, where they get over the problem eating 3x/day poses by discovering the joy of good food. instead we got "white saviors teach ignorant natives how to cook meat"
So, let me get this straight: Isla figures out that she’s in love with Rhysand by being able to tap into his power. This implies a protagonist so divorced from her emotions that she can only understand them via a magical macguffin. Ok. Cool. I’ll buy this. I’ve met people who can really only process and understand their emotions by intellectualizing them. This is a thing. (In the hands of a better author potentially an excellent thing.) But then it turns out that she was so emotional that the raw emotionality of her magic wiped out a bunch of tusken raider children or whatever. Hey, Aster? These are two different characters. It would have been so cool if Isla was, in fact, so divorced from her feelings that every time she said she loved Oro, he couldn’t get a read on her with his billionth superpower - because even she doesn’t know what she feels. What a cool way to for once counter a magical ability not with MORE ad hoc magic-ex-machina, but rather an attempt at real characterization instead.
Grim is an awful character, like sure he's the villain, but his whole character just sucks. And he doesn't have to be nice, but he's not even nice to Isla.
Okay okay. I talked about this during the premiere of crow callers review but I HAVE to bring up the character art again WHY. IS. ISLA. TINY. Strength can come in many shapes and sizes, and there absolutely are athletes and such who are skinny, but she is a god damn swordswoman! She’s been training since she was like 3!! GIVE HER SOME MUSCLE also Oro looking like. that. Makes me weirdly uncomfortable. I was imagining him at least a little bit more battleworn, considering he’s. 500+ years old and a warrior. GRIM? THATS the guy we’re supposed to believe is a war criminal, a mastermind? If you’re gonna make the king of a realm whose style is basically just “slutty rave goths”, DEDICATE. Again, aster has written a character who should nor physically be a tank, so PUT HIM *IN* A TANK. give that guy some black lace and funky pants PLEASE And don’t even get me STARTED on Celeste and Cleo- they look identical!! Without the names I wouldn’t be able to tell you which one is which, it’s infuriating. Cleo is, again, a 500+ y/o warrior, WHY does she look exactly like the supposedly -25 y/o pretty princess Celeste. She should be a little worn from battle, from past centennials, from being involved with her GOD DAMN NAVY Azul, oh Azul my boy I’m so sorry. Why is he grey. Please. Why is he grey. I’m fine with everything else, the outfit doesn’t make sense but at least it looks kinda neat, but he is so desaturated it’s baffling To be clear, the art style itself is very nice I just. These designs. Oh god these designs.
"Grim is the only thing standing between us and a greater danger you can't even begin to fathom." And it turned out to be Grim's own jealous temper tantrum
another video that reminds me that the only thing stopping me from finishing a book is me. so much bad stuff gets published all the time, why shouldn’t i publish my bad stuff?
Totally agree? I really don`t want to sound mean but seeing what books are published everyday gives me hope for my projects. Motivation is on high Speed and only a handful of Chapters are left before ending it.
I get Aster wanting to make the main character royalty so that she can dress her up and so there’s fashion/aesthetic content for the fandom to pull from. But why are there royals in this world at all? Clearly rulers don’t do much since isla can be locked in a room forever with no political or social repercussions for the wildlings. Do the wildlings even like her? Isla’s living expenses had to be paid somehow so I assume her people were paying for her care. But if they liked their queen enough to pay for her lifestyle, why didn’t anyone care when she disappeared from public life? The royalty thing is just so flimsy. I’d be so pissed if I had to serve a monarch who gets all the fun magic, super long lifespan, and does nothing but be pampered while everyone else is screwed over by these curses. It could have been cool if the world/magic system was more hostile towards the people or there was some type of trade off for the magic/powers of each isle?Maybe having powers hurts or there’s some other consequence. And so each group chose a bloodline to kinda take on the consequence of the magic so the rest of the people could live normally? Like maybe Isla is the only wildling with the love kills/heart eating curse and because of that the rest of the wildlings only get the good aspects of wildling magic?
I believe it is canon that even if wildlings (or any other race in the book) wanted to abolish monarchy, they can't actually do it. Basically, there is a curse that if the ruler dies than all of their subjects die with them.😅
The only reason there are rulers in this stupid world is because A) Apparently rulers siphon their power into the land and the people and make it habitable, making even the most useless ruler an irreplaceable asset to their kingdom B) The people are connected to the ruler. If the ruler dies so does people which is another reason why they havent chosen who needs to die. Its all just a buch of convoluted bullshit Aster put in as overconditioning to "raise the stakes" but all it does it make you question how this stupid magic system even works
I will stand by the saying: ✨️Keep it simple, stupid.✨️ Characters + World is complex, but the plot is *simple* and as a Writer myself, it should be encouraged to reread your first book/notes before continuing to the sequel.
@@mikankitsune0440reading it feels a lot like wanting a bbq sandwich and going to McDonald’s for a McRib instead of going to your local bbq restaurant. Sure, both are food. But one is obviously better. Sure this is a book, but it’s a McRib in comparison to others in the same genre and age range.
@@ReadswithRachel Agreed. I write Fantasy/Young Adult/New Adult fiction and I've definitely read better books over my years as a reader and as a writer.
Omg, YES. I’m also an avid reader and a writer myself, and when I started writing sequels to my original fantasy story, I had the original and every sequel after that beside me in case I needed to reference or refresh something.
for some reason, the official description/art of Oro pisses me off. In the same way as 'a 100000-year-old dragon but in a little girl's body' does. (kinda, cause that crap pisses me off more than this). He's this 500-year-old king who been in battles. Make this guy look older, give him facial hair, give this man some scars! Come on!
At least he respects her with respect of boundaries, unlike grim. He is sadly the healthy choice. I agree groro would be the best couple as really good contrasts and similar power and that fight at the end has to be the most chemestry? Besides no power imbalance.
To be fair, the whole “Grim is holding back something worse” being retconned is also an ACOTAR holdover, in the sense that in book 1 they kept saying that “Amarantha is only the beginning and there’s so much worse out there” and there really wasn’t. Amarantha was the only worthy Big Bad they ever faced.
Technically be bonecarver and his sister maybe, but again, they werent villains but allies, and nothing bad got out of that old prison thingy. That could have been worthy big bads in the cave, but true, never happened.
@@ReadswithRachel your videos are informative, entertaining, and honestly the reason I got back into creative writing again. Thanks for all the work you put in for this channel, it's much appreciated!
I"m just now realising that the character names sound like they belong in a middle grade book - Oro (gold) Rey (king): Sunling ruler and King of lightlark - Grimshaw (dark wood) Malvere (falsely): Nightshade ruler, name could not sound more evil - Celeste (heavenly): Starling ruler - Azul (blue): Skyling ruler There's nothing wrong with naming characters to match their role/job, it's just a practice that is better suited to children's books.
Didn’t Alex Aster publish a few middle grade books before Lightlark? That would explain why the naming is so childish, because that’s what she’s used to working well. (Maybe I’m misremembering but I think that was part of the reason why people were mad at her, because she was claiming she was a debut author with 10 years of rejections but in reality she was already a published author with an agent and a few books under the belt.)
This honestly sounds like a preteen's first attempt at writing fantasy (i.e. my first attempt at writing fantasy which was just as full of confusing and poorly thought out worldbuilding and clumsy plot progression, plot holes galore, bad descriptions etc etc)
My first attempts at original fantasy at 10-12 were so much like Lightlark's world too: everyone has too many powers entirely for convenience (I think my cringiest was when one character suddenly developed electricity powers entirely to revive another character like a human defibrillator, lol), on-the-nose names, and a setting that sounded cool to me but didn't actually make any sense. To the point where I feel almost like I'm calling out my own younger self by criticizing Lightlark. On the other hand, I didn't have an editor and never made any money off it, so.
I can not wait for if you try to explain this book to Carlos. Those videos are just “Ahh time to rewatch my fav bookish comfort videos. Watching Rachel and Carlos rip apart objectively awful books.” Also I hope you explain the Christmas novella to him around Christmas. Like “Merry Christmas this novella has weird flying sky sex”
So I was listening to this as I was cleaning my dishes and I thought, “Hm. This sounds like the author actually wanted to create a fantasy webcomic, but thought writing a book would be easier.” AND THEN I LOOKED AT THE SCREEN 😂 There is NO WAY this author doesn’t read Isekai manga/manhwa (those who know, know lmao). She’s not writing a story, she’s writing character designs. A lot of the problems in this series would be mitigated (but not erased) if it were in a visual medium. Poor writing in comics sometimes gets tolerated if the art is good enough. Subpar art might be tolerated if the story is good enough. When it comes to novels? You can’t “pretty dress” your way out of technical problems. Writing might be technically “easier” than drawing (as in it’s a skill that’s often more accessible since most of us start learning it early) but that doesn’t mean it’s not still hard af to craft a good story. And I’d say reading books is so much more involved than reading comics (I can say that, I’m an artist). People are gunna notice when something doesn’t make any sense, especially if the prose is bad. they won’t be as willing to overlook mistakes.
What precisely would you say this has in common with isekai manga/manwha? Possibly somewhat of the setting, but I feel the isekai formula mostly centers around a male power fantasy including harem, and I'm not really seeing that here. I'm moreso seeing the trashy YA I grew up with evident by the "chosen one"/"not like other girls" trope, and the crappy love triangle.
@@amara560 From what I remember of this video I meant aesthetically lol. The descriptions of the characters, the focus on style over substance, character decisions not making any sense, etc… not that there aren’t fantastic isekai stories, but the genre is overrun with melodramatics and bad writing.
As a writer, one of my biggest fears is that I will forget when and what important information is revealed and to whom it's given and who said it. As a result, I have endless charts and documents tracking all important info. God help me if I ever wrote an entire book based on forgetting some important information that was revealed in a previous book! I would be mortified.
Continued proof that she barely had enough of an idea for the first book and was scrambling to construct the second by any means (retconning) necessary.
I remember watching your original review on Lightlark, as well as other reviews of it, and thinking “not only is this book just generally not good, it is also incompetent at being a story and a book.” I’m so pleased that you are getting into that here using actually good writing advice.
33:52 Like I said in one of Lou's videos, it would be like if I wrote about a Goldling from the Goldling Isle who is greedy, has a hooked nose and works in a bank and has to be taught by "regular" people how to distribute money. I wouldn't be subverting anything; I'd be hurting my own people.
A better way to make this love triangle work would be Grim and Isla actually do love one another. But for plot reasons they both had to forget about it and the love was thinly painted over with antagonism via magic. Oro doesn’t love Isla but for the SAME plot reasons had his legitimate feelings of affection for a daughter figure painted over with love via same magic. Then Isla had her legitimate feelings of the affection of a friend and surrogate dad turned to romantic love. If all three of these set all of this in motion BEFORE the start of the first book and both books were about uncovering all of this and the reasons why they would choose to do this it would make a better book/love triangle. Maybe not a particularly GREAT book, but certainly better and more well thought out/put together.
Or how grim and oro were lovers. If they were, they could have a heated dynamic neither grim or oro would tell her and traumatic, but thats why they have that eweird relationship? I mean make groro canon?! Because they have the best potentional dynamic going on. with no creepy power inbalance.
Honestly the whole 'where are they getting the hearts' could very easily be solved with something that Aster already wrote: The starlings, who all die at 25. I dont know what people are doing with the bodies of dead starlings, other than there's probably way more corpses on starling than any other islands just by nature of how these lifespans seem to work, but there eventually becomes the issue of 'where do you put them' and shipping them off to the wildlings seems like an efficient way of solving two problems at once. It would even create an excuse for why Isla would know Celeste despite her isolation and even feel a sense of loyalty for her, given she's helping her people not starve (I fully dont remember how Isla and Celeste met in the first book and honestly dont care). And yeah thats MORBID but if you're going to do this whole "uniquely terrible curses" angle then getting into the details would definitely help sell the idea.
the curses are morbid but they also have to be AESTHETIC!!! Maybe that's the problem with these books. They want to be aesthetic fantasy like ACOTAR, but they rip off the Hunger Games. The Hunger Games is about a fascist state that murders children to keep their beaten-down subjects in line. The over-the-top fantasy-like fashions of the Capitol were grotesque critiques of capitalist overconsumption and excess. None of that fits with an aesthetic fantasy world.
Your frequent uploads lately have been a GODSEND Rachel. I made the (terrible, stupid, ridiculous) decision to crochet gifts for everyone in my family and it's officially crunch time to get them done, and your videos are always the perfect thing to watch while I do it
[SJM spoilers ahead] From the perspective of someone who unfortunately remembers ACOMAF almost page-by-page, my guess is that the reason everyone assumes Grim is evil is that everyone assumed Rhysand was. In ACOMAF there’s a scene where Feyre spies a map on his wall, and without any context she starts begging him not to invade the human realms. Because his eeeevil reputation precedes him. This is also why there was a secret off-page marriage that gets dramatically revealed by Grim at the end of book 2. This is exactly what happened at the end of ACOMAF (and also at the end of Empire Of Storms). And I don’t think I even need to address the whole “She died so he brought her back by forming a bond between them and tethering their life force to one another.” And then she just pulls a Crescent City at the end with the whole “we actually came from a different world” nonsense, except Alex Aster doesn’t have other series, so nobody cares and this reveal doesn’t matter.
i'm out of the target audience for YA now but i can't imagine late-teen/early-20's me genuinely enjoying half the booktok trends that get marketed today without putting herself into a reading slump forcing herself to finish 😭
I usually feel like I understand the plot of a book pretty well after you explain it, but this one? No clue what’s going on. Sounds like that’s how this series be.
If there is one thing I hate about these royalty-fantasy based YA books is how much the royalty characters are either morons who don't know a goddamn thing despite being a ruler of a people (Isla) or their political situation is so MC centric that it doesn't make any feasible sense when interacting with other rulers (Literally Rhysand and the inner circle). The lack of idk, state craft, like the way that rulers and states interact with each other, makes this whole attempt at political intrigue stupid and lackluster. We see how Isla (cough Alex Aster cough) has no clue about Wildlings bc of her isolation from the two caretakers/abusers, that's fine and a legit explanation, but then Aster puts no effort into Isla actually learning and doing right by them or the starlings. I'm not saying that it would be interesting to read but this is showing how poorly thought out this is. But no they have this war thing to fight, even though it was poorly established and why tf would anyone want to fight for a ruler who they don't know and isn't solving your problems that have been a thing for a while. It's insane😮
"They had to go into the trash, not the children, the bubble wand" had me spitting out my coffee on my keyboard pleaseeee 😭also that lazy line, "she ran like she was running from something," sounds like something i would get tattooed also, the vomit of magic and powers in this book is enough to make 5 different books with hugely different plots. but the excessive plot holes are too much, you're leaving readers with a lot more question marks than answers or conclusion.
36 mins in and i literally guarantee if i tried to run a dnd campaign with this as the plot (as it is, no corrections) i would get absolutely clowned on. i don't think this would've even popped off on wattpad back in the day bro
1:36 re-write: Isla prowled the castle corridors, her fury rippling off her like waves. Power writhed beneath her skin, begging for an outlet to wreck havoc. She darted through the twisting halls as if pursuers nipped at her heels, magic sparking at her fingertips. Her dagger whipped from its sheath, the cold steel an extension of her panicked grip. Chills rattled her bones; every footstep echoed her pulsing need to flee this place forever.
I simultaneously have great self-esteem when even this can get published (then so can I) and also great horror because THIS can get published?? Her writing makes me feel literally nothing except sometimes confusion, which makes me annoyed. Great video as always dude!
I love that the sponsor became an interactive sponsor; she used her skill share class knowledge! Btw I hope you recover well from your renal aka kidney infection.
You mentioned after ghosts were introduced that too much was going on. I don't think that's the issue. Fantasy worlds should be rich and immersive. The problem with Aster is that there is no depth or connections between aspects of her world-building. She just takes a bunch of concepts that she likes and whip-stiches everything together without much thought. So when she introduces something new, it feels like it came out of nowhere rather than adding another interesting layer to the world. It falls back on the fact that she's an awful writer, that and I'm convinced her editor is actively doing Aster dirty. 🤣 The prose are so bad, at what point can we start talking about sabotage? 🤣🤣
Something that has been bothering me with books like Lightlark and Nightbane is that some publishers and writers are pushing for YA/Teen books to appeal (and marketing) to mostly 20 years old and older (maybe cause these publishers and writers see that teens are not as likely to have a stable disposable income especially in this messed up economy) and to the detriment of teen readers who are more than smart enough to be annoyed knowing when books are being written and marketed for a different audience than them but claiming its for their demographic. Then the publishers chose to price out those teen readers out of books meant for them by refusing to release the paperbacks for the new releases of YA/Teen books and the book industry wonder why it is having a hard time getting newer readers and being able to keep them. It's madness I tell you.
I think about my fav childhood books, books I think are well written, like The Phantom Tollbooth, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, and the Wrinkle in Time series. Compare those to "She ran like she was running from something". Those are actually in the Kids' section, versus this as YA. That's one hell of a downslide.
I find it hilarious that despite your profile picture being from Harry Potter, you didn't list it as well written. Even putting aside the unfortunateness of JKR, those books' quality really isn't as good as we all remember ("'Snape!' ejaculated Slughorn" and all that lmao)
Wait why did I just get that the "savagery" of heart eating is how colonizers described Aztecs for their religious cultural practices of heart sacrifices. It didn't fully click to me until 50:45
a braver writer would've killed isla off, made an oro x grim romance, and made oro black (i honest to goodness thought oro was black in every review i've watched)
There was actually an ACOTAR fanfic with similar premise at one point. Considering that Aster is ripping off Sara j. Maas, this is the next best thing.
dear lord the flare thing irks me so much cuz I see potential for it!! having it be for people in high standing can work and have the flares correlate to what they need when theyre under an extremely pressured situation!! oros being able to tell lies can make sense if ppl are vying for his power, grims teleporting can work for an unstable safety i can see some potental and it upsets me
i appreciate you so much for bringing tangible aspects from your sponsor reads into the rest of the video. that is testament that this service is actually worth my time
I've never had the urge to read either of these books, but listening to this just cements that thought. I feel like I've definitely read far better fanfiction than this convoluted plot of characters and attempted world building.
This was wacky as hell, you really are the bravest among us for putting yourself through this ridiculous book. Thank you for the unhinged plot summary, hope you read something amazing soon to cleanse the palette!
I hate how every time Aster touches a touchy topic like indigenous people (and subsequently reservations), chattel slavery, what seems like a poor understanding of the Underground Railroad (or maybe it was just a coincidence), child abuse, abuse from romantic partner, grooming, monarchies , having diaspora despite living on the same land as your people etc. she manages to mess it up. It’s at best something she ignores like everything about Grim and at worse makes you wonder what type of person she is in real life. Like why where the Starlings, whom have gone through literal hundreds of years of chattel slavery, suddenly looking at Isla like a literal goddess/savior. As if the Wildlings wouldn’t be the biggest offenders of their enslavement. I mean the math still ain’t mathing but the Wildlings eating Starling hearts wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination. Just look at what slave owners did in real life and remember that they don’t even have a curse. Edit: going off the assumption that the Wildlings were definitely big offenders of Starling’s slavery they would also know how to do agricultural. Or at least the slaves would. Because if you keep killing slaves you’re going to need new ones and since this is chattel slavery breeding farms would be a thing and you need food for that. Also we know that starling slaves were at least around Wildlings because of that whole off-brand Underground Railroad thing that’s mentioned when at the wildling palace… Aster never thought twice about the implications of Starlings going through slavery and and Wildlings literally needing hearts to eat and it shows. The fact that there aren’t certian sects/tribes of Wildlings known for having a robust slave trade and organ market is crazy.
I really enjoyed your "collab" with the skillshare guy and your applying what you learned in his course to your review of this book. Was a very good format, I appreciate you doing the work to analyze...it's clearly more than this book deserves, but still...👍😁💜
6:17 no no no no no absolutely not! Alex Aster, don't you dare look me in the eye and tell me that her name is "Iz-la" and not "Eye-la" That is just insulting!
yay yay i was looking forward to this review!!! also after just reading lightlark (for the bit lol) i think you're 100% right about oro/isla having no relationship ground to stand on. also grim wiping her memories only to flirt with her. like. how rad would it have been for grim to keep distance and pine from afar while isla slowly falls for oro & is unable to deny the fact that she's weirdly attracted to this other guy who won't give her the time of day but is actually working behind the scenes to help her (grim)?? and then when we find out at the end they were together isla is like "no, i could've never loved you. you aren't as *good* as oro" blah blah blah playing into grim's insecurities and yeah
no idea what the plot of the second book is yet (i'm only 16 mins into the video so far) & not that i think there's an ounce of potential in this idea, but your critiques just inspired/got me thinking. your mind❤
As you were talking about the characters having no reason to be in love and the fact that we never saw the actual unfolding of the relationship, I had a strange epiphany. Does this kind of "we just met and are in love now" happen so often in lazily written, tropey books as a result of compulsory heteronormativity? This might be a reach, but if it's a given to a straight person that the universal experience is "You Will Meet a Boy/Girl and Love Happens" with little complication, some authors may not feel the need to fill in the gaps. "Don't worry about how, this is A Thing That Happens so I wrote it down because characters do that in stories." I'd think this would be especially true if they are very young authors with relatively little life experience. Again, I feel like I might be reaching, this could be too broad a statement to make, but I feel like this comment section might feel me. As a disclaimer, I am not assuming to know Aster's sexuality and am fully aware that comphet absolutely can hit any one of us without us knowing, no matter where we land.
No, that's definitely it. In nearly 30 years of consuming media I can definitely tell the double standards with how queer and straight relationships are accepted by the audience. A cis woman and cis man often have to just stand next to each other or make prolonged eyecontact to be accepted, and queer relationships need a whole arc and dissertation to even be considered as valid.
I think that's why so many of us like friends to lovers and enemies to lovers. The author is promising an actual journey to the relationship, not just Love At First Sight Instant Perfection Everything is Fine (and also usually Toxic)
i cannot emphasize enough how much more interesting the character descriptions of "If she cant end the curse this centennial will be her last" and "his smile is a mask and his jewels are deception" sound at least on the surface and how lightlark could've at least have been a passable plot & even romance if those were our main characters. like a protagonist who has an actual life or death reason to want to save her people and herself and has a reason to be clueless bc theres no adults paired with a love interest who's cunning but actually laughs and jokes and flirts with a smile instead of a scowl? almost revolutionary at this point
it's a Christmas miracle 🙇🏻♀️🙌🏻🏃🏻♀️ so keen to watch this so I can giggle and kick my feet at the nonsense whilst not having to suffer through it myself❤️
Wouldn't it be hilarious if they weren't actually eating human hearts and were just eating beets or something and there was a translation error? The whole kingdom could be vegetarian and everyone thinks they're cannibals because they eat something that they named based in its resemblance to a heart.
It’s stuff like this that makes me want to read fanfics of this book series. I’m sure that LightLark will be one of the series where the source material/cannon stuff sucks but the fanfics are god-tier
You know what I hate about all this…the book titles are actually pretty eye catching!! What is a lightark,what is a nightbane,I like book titles that make me curious about what it means and what it could be about before picking it up to read the description. Alex your good at making neat titles,but you gotta improve your craft girl,we’re not hating on your work,we want you to improve and be better
I’m 1:36 in and you just put the paragraph up. I’m a writing teacher for middle school/junior high. When I get a sentence like that, I cross out the THREE similes and tell them they can only use one. Then, they must change the other descriptors. They can make one a metaphor and possibly use alliteration or personification for another. They would also need to change the verbs to strong verbs (we have a list) and use strong adjectives/adverbs (also lists available). Plus, they would be told the sentence construction is unacceptable. Sorry for the lesson. I might use this as an example of bad writing for my students and have them make it better. They LOVE doing that.
Don't say sorry because this is SO. VALIDATING. I had so many people tell me on tiktok that that is just "typical YA writing" and I was pulling my hair out.
@@ReadswithRachel that’s disheartening. I don’t think it’s typical for YA. It might be typical for her readers, but I do think a majority of YA authors take their work seriously and work just as hard and YA readers deserve well written books. It’s not a throw away industry like, ‘you go sit at the kids table with the crayons and glitter’.
Some thoughts as I watch your video: Why are they letting a nineteen year old girl rule TWO kingdoms? Since the curse is broken I guess people can visit lightlark but what was keeping people from lightlark except for the centennials? The curses? I swear she just comes up with random stuff as she writes which is fine but you need to decide what is actually important to character development and the plot. This could’ve been so much better if she didn’t try to shove so much into two books.
Altogether, I’m just disappointed by what this series is. I remember when she first started promoting Lightlark on TikTok before it got published. It seemed like a really cool concept.
@@ReadswithRachel More money I’m assuming. From the writing of these books, I don’t believe she’s doing this out of a love for writing. It’s for fame and money it seems like. I hope I’m wrong but I get weird vibes from her now
I think everybody feels that way now because of her relentless and very particular type of marketing that she does. When you hear other authors, talking about their books, they normally comment on like what was important to them to write into the characters and what was important to write into the book theme wise. I have never seen an interview with her or a single tick-tock where she does that and I always wonder why because I can’t think of a single other author who markets like this. It makes me wonder if she cares what’s in her book.
I know Isla wasn’t affected by the Wildling curse, but it would’ve made more sense if she was. Because then the reason Grim wiped her memory could’ve been to prevent her killing him because she was in love with him.
I wonder if Alex Aster wanted to title these books "Lightling" and "Nightling", but that was the only thing her editor said no to. (side note this video didn't show up in my subscription box, which was weird because that's never happened before.)
That line about you not needing to make the audience care about the character, just their motivations/objective is so true. It's how a lot of detective fiction works, imo. Like I love Agatha Christie's stuff, but most of her characters are just forgettable characterchures, which is perfectly fine because the entire point of their existence is to be a piece in the mystery. Also hard agree on YA stuff being fine. I haven't been a fan of the more recent trends in YA and largely avoid it now, but many of my favorite books are YA. Uglies by Scott Westerfield and The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud come to mind. I'm currently rereading East by Edith Pattou and that's definitely YA, but still highly enjoyable.
37:19 "the skin of her stomach" being "scraped clean" is so nonsensical that I assumed she'd been so violently seasick on the journey that her roiling stomach acid had worn down the sides of her stomach...so yeah bad writing if two different people get completely different vibes.
Commenting for algorithm and for love for Rachel for suffering through this!!! At least the Divine Rivals sequels coming out this month!! Hopefully it will cancel out the ick from reading Nightbane
The first 500 people to click the link will get a 1-month free trial of Skillshare skl.sh/readswithrachel12231
@@oneinamalonereadsomg yay! Also: Welcome to UA-cam!! ❤❤❤❤
@@ReadswithRachel thank you so much! You're a HUGE inspiration for me getting started to be honest, I love your candor and the way you advocate for good books for readers
I'm not even 2 minutes in but "she ran like she was running from something" has already taken me out.
Welcome to hell!
LMAO
It's so easy to makes this sentence better too like " She ran as if her own shadow plotted her death" like that indicates so much more of what the character is feeling/ thinking. Like intense fear of imaginary foes or that she's so paranoid even her shadow seems like an enemy she can't escape from.
@@FaiAshland ooh I love that
my jaw actually dropped when she put that on the screen
I hate how people assume YA is supposed to be poorly written. Like it being for children doesn't mean it has to suck.
T H I S!!!!! Thank you!!!
@@ReadswithRachel
It also gets on my nervous when adults say they read YA because it's "simple". It's not simple, the stories are complex for the audience that it's designed for. I think adults who read YA for leisure should try novellas bc they aren't getting what they need from YA.
I don't understand why people think like this about YA. Theme-wise sure, things are made to be understood for the age bracket but that doesn't make the book overall "simple". Even Amari and The Night Brothers, which is middle grade, is not a book I'd call "simple". It's written to be understood by a middle grade audience but still has complexity in it's worldbuilding and character arcs and themes.
@@ReadswithRachel
Exactly! I salute authors who write for children because as adults we are so far removed from the troubles of children, especially since we have an emotional depth they lack.
It's an insult to these authors and books like LightLark are an insult to the genre of YA.
I think the Godling Chronicles are YA and that book series is a wonderful read lol. The opening is by far the best opening I've ever read for a story.
I think people forget what types of books teens are assigned to read in school. Teenagers are perfectly capable of reading and understanding books intended for adults, the draw of YA is the relatable characters and themes.
Love how the author recreated reservations by “consolidating the savages” who “willingly gave their homes to the volunteers”. Very cool very nice
nothing problematic about that at all /s
In the last book Alex had indigenous cannibals so at this point I'm not even surprised I'm just disappointed
@@SpecialInterestShow White authors don't write racist tropes challenge (impossible)
the thing is, Aster is apparently indigenous Colombian. It's incredibly sad she doesn't even recognize how she's disrespecting her own heritage. (And dumb tbh)@@darthbr3nnan
@@sao-me1lt that’s so terribly sad
I ah....was not prepared for the character art where everyone looks 16 years old and like they've never been troubled by more than a late chemistry paper or a chipped nail.
Trashy Webtoon looking faces
I thought Oro would at least have a beard! 😂
@@sparkymularkey6970honestly it’s a crime he doesn’t.
I imagined Oro as more of an Elrond type, but seeing him resemble King Joffrey instead has me floored
@@NukularBanana oh NO I'll never unsee it I laughed like a honking goose
I swear Oro was like a 60 year old man that may or may not look like the Burger King in my head....
OMG I WILL NOT EVER UNSEE IT
bruh I thought he looked like the king guy from the Minecraft parody of Viva La Vida(but not blocky), not some basic blonde-headed kid.
@@saintdude6032i just typed that into youtube and the thumbnail is all i needed to see, thanks a lot 😂
@@saintdude6032 I had to look it up and by the gods, i'm so thankful that i did. thank you for putting that image in my head im in tears sdnaldna
Intro to Grim in book 1: gives her chocolate which scares her because shes not supposed to eat anything but hearts but he already knows she doesnt eat hearts
Book 2: The Wildlings have a chef! And patisserier! They love chocolate!
From another review of the first book - I think that Grim asks her if she likes chocolate and she says she could eat heaps of it, so I don't think it's a scary proposition, and she definitely has had chocolate before. It isn't explained how this jives with Wildlings "living exclusively on human hearts" - maybe they can eat other food but get no sustenance from it?
Not that the 1 human heart/month diet for Wildlings ever made any sense. 12 humans per year per Wildling? Do these have to be adult hearts? The logistics are just insane.
@@godminnette2 given the fact it was stablished Isla gets 1 heart every night for dinner. It seems the "feeds exclusively on human hearts" is very literal
Ill be really sad if the next book isnt "NightLight - the LarkBane"
Lightlark
2 Light 2 Lark
Lightlark: Tokyo Drift
Light & Lark
Light 5
Lightlark 6
Lark 7
The Fate of the Lark
L9
Light X
The Bane of Night and Lark Light 😂
I hate to disappoint, but book three is gonna be called Skyshade. It just got announced
@@Fischohnerad17 well guess now we just need a 4th book after titled something Moon related. and a 5th with Wild in the title and all four clans have their bases covered with a book title.
Wouldn't it have made more sense to have had Oro and Isla have a previous relationship, that Grim made both her and Oro forget so he could make Isla fall in love with him instead. I don't even like romance books but that makes more sense than having Grim flirt with Isla constantly when he's the one who took her memories for seemingly no reason.
Not only would it have made more sense, that’s a plot I actually like!
Yeah fr! I’ve always been a big fan of any memory loss trope, but the way Lightlark handles it is frankly embarrassing. I need to memory loss my way out of the summary to save my sanity
I ranted about this in someone else’s review of _Nightbane,_ but in my opinion, transitioning the Wildling people from an all-heart diet to a regular food diet is a far more complex and interesting plot idea than whatever _Nightbane_ is about. Didn’t Wildlings only have to eat a few times a week or month? I would be so mad if I went from being able to subsist on one heart a week to having to eat three times a day.
I want to say it’s once a month yes!
Oh my goodness yes! Eating three times a day is already exhausting
it would be such a good way to introduce a self-indulgent cooking subplot too, where they get over the problem eating 3x/day poses by discovering the joy of good food. instead we got "white saviors teach ignorant natives how to cook meat"
So, let me get this straight: Isla figures out that she’s in love with Rhysand by being able to tap into his power. This implies a protagonist so divorced from her emotions that she can only understand them via a magical macguffin.
Ok. Cool. I’ll buy this. I’ve met people who can really only process and understand their emotions by intellectualizing them. This is a thing. (In the hands of a better author potentially an excellent thing.)
But then it turns out that she was so emotional that the raw emotionality of her magic wiped out a bunch of tusken raider children or whatever.
Hey, Aster? These are two different characters.
It would have been so cool if Isla was, in fact, so divorced from her feelings that every time she said she loved Oro, he couldn’t get a read on her with his billionth superpower - because even she doesn’t know what she feels. What a cool way to for once counter a magical ability not with MORE ad hoc magic-ex-machina, but rather an attempt at real characterization instead.
It has the same stupid “love triangle” vibes that ACOTAR has that made me DNF the series. Grim just feels like off brand Rhysand.
Grim is an awful character, like sure he's the villain, but his whole character just sucks. And he doesn't have to be nice, but he's not even nice to Isla.
All the love interests these days feel like bootleg Rhysand at this point
Because he is.
The Rhysand we have at home
I mean if f she rejected grim and stick with that , i can give some praise that she choose oro, as not the worst rgrim
Okay okay. I talked about this during the premiere of crow callers review but I HAVE to bring up the character art again
WHY. IS. ISLA. TINY. Strength can come in many shapes and sizes, and there absolutely are athletes and such who are skinny, but she is a god damn swordswoman! She’s been training since she was like 3!! GIVE HER SOME MUSCLE
also Oro looking like. that. Makes me weirdly uncomfortable. I was imagining him at least a little bit more battleworn, considering he’s. 500+ years old and a warrior.
GRIM? THATS the guy we’re supposed to believe is a war criminal, a mastermind? If you’re gonna make the king of a realm whose style is basically just “slutty rave goths”, DEDICATE. Again, aster has written a character who should nor physically be a tank, so PUT HIM *IN* A TANK. give that guy some black lace and funky pants PLEASE
And don’t even get me STARTED on Celeste and Cleo- they look identical!! Without the names I wouldn’t be able to tell you which one is which, it’s infuriating. Cleo is, again, a 500+ y/o warrior, WHY does she look exactly like the supposedly -25 y/o pretty princess Celeste. She should be a little worn from battle, from past centennials, from being involved with her GOD DAMN NAVY
Azul, oh Azul my boy I’m so sorry. Why is he grey. Please. Why is he grey. I’m fine with everything else, the outfit doesn’t make sense but at least it looks kinda neat, but he is so desaturated it’s baffling
To be clear, the art style itself is very nice I just. These designs. Oh god these designs.
Celeste and Cleo are so similar I mix up their names constantly in my notes. They are basically copy pasted.
The artwork of Oro is giving royal AU Peeta Mellark lol listening to reviews I always pictured oro as middle -aged so this is WEIRD
Cackling at “slutty rave goths” because you hit the nail on the head.
@@Flareontoast IM WHEEZING AT THIS COMMENT???????? WHY IS IT SO TRUE
I thought Azul was black and it was just the lightning that made him look grey.💀
I didn’t see the “readers” tattoo on the opening art at first so my sleepyhead brain thought the image meant to say “reviews are for beetles” 😂
Beetles are watching this like FINALLY
@@ReadswithRachel I personally support beetles’ rights to literacy!
Ah, good, another person who didn't look closely at first. I was like "Reviews are for cockroaches?!"
9:07 She spoke like she was saying something
She ate hearts like she was eating something
"Grim is the only thing standing between us and a greater danger you can't even begin to fathom."
And it turned out to be Grim's own jealous temper tantrum
"... The wand, not the children 😌"
😂😂😂, thank you for clarifying!
Soon as a said it I knew I had to clarify 😂
another video that reminds me that the only thing stopping me from finishing a book is me. so much bad stuff gets published all the time, why shouldn’t i publish my bad stuff?
IKR? Same 😆
Totally agree? I really don`t want to sound mean but seeing what books are published everyday gives me hope for my projects. Motivation is on high Speed and only a handful of Chapters are left before ending it.
@@TheTrueKarin it’s okay to be a little bit mean if it has meaning
I get Aster wanting to make the main character royalty so that she can dress her up and so there’s fashion/aesthetic content for the fandom to pull from. But why are there royals in this world at all? Clearly rulers don’t do much since isla can be locked in a room forever with no political or social repercussions for the wildlings.
Do the wildlings even like her? Isla’s living expenses had to be paid somehow so I assume her people were paying for her care. But if they liked their queen enough to pay for her lifestyle, why didn’t anyone care when she disappeared from public life? The royalty thing is just so flimsy. I’d be so pissed if I had to serve a monarch who gets all the fun magic, super long lifespan, and does nothing but be pampered while everyone else is screwed over by these curses.
It could have been cool if the world/magic system was more hostile towards the people or there was some type of trade off for the magic/powers of each isle?Maybe having powers hurts or there’s some other consequence. And so each group chose a bloodline to kinda take on the consequence of the magic so the rest of the people could live normally? Like maybe Isla is the only wildling with the love kills/heart eating curse and because of that the rest of the wildlings only get the good aspects of wildling magic?
Because you clearly put more thought into this than Aster did.
This is such a interesting take on magic! I love it❤
I believe it is canon that even if wildlings (or any other race in the book) wanted to abolish monarchy, they can't actually do it. Basically, there is a curse that if the ruler dies than all of their subjects die with them.😅
That's so smart! But, you see, that would be GOOD writing-
The only reason there are rulers in this stupid world is because
A) Apparently rulers siphon their power into the land and the people and make it habitable, making even the most useless ruler an irreplaceable asset to their kingdom
B) The people are connected to the ruler. If the ruler dies so does people which is another reason why they havent chosen who needs to die.
Its all just a buch of convoluted bullshit Aster put in as overconditioning to "raise the stakes" but all it does it make you question how this stupid magic system even works
I will stand by the saying: ✨️Keep it simple, stupid.✨️ Characters + World is complex, but the plot is *simple* and as a Writer myself, it should be encouraged to reread your first book/notes before continuing to the sequel.
This. I have a sneaking suspicion this book was not written after being reread by anyone involved in publishing it
@@ReadswithRachel Oh, completely. It reeks of mass produced pulp that was done only to cash in on the controversial success of the first book.
@@mikankitsune0440reading it feels a lot like wanting a bbq sandwich and going to McDonald’s for a McRib instead of going to your local bbq restaurant. Sure, both are food. But one is obviously better. Sure this is a book, but it’s a McRib in comparison to others in the same genre and age range.
@@ReadswithRachel Agreed. I write Fantasy/Young Adult/New Adult fiction and I've definitely read better books over my years as a reader and as a writer.
Omg, YES. I’m also an avid reader and a writer myself, and when I started writing sequels to my original fantasy story, I had the original and every sequel after that beside me in case I needed to reference or refresh something.
for some reason, the official description/art of Oro pisses me off.
In the same way as 'a 100000-year-old dragon but in a little girl's body' does. (kinda, cause that crap pisses me off more than this).
He's this 500-year-old king who been in battles.
Make this guy look older, give him facial hair, give this man some scars! Come on!
Fully agree with you. Why does he look like he’s in college and has never been to war?! He’s 600 and a king. Come on.
At least he respects her with respect of boundaries, unlike grim. He is sadly the healthy choice.
I agree groro would be the best couple as really good contrasts and similar power and that fight at the end has to be the most chemestry? Besides no power imbalance.
i keep getting shocked at how aggressively on-the-nose their names are. like. it seems like a bit. isla crown???
And who can forget her sidekicks: Blue, Gold, Heaven, and Grim, like literally just the word grim. I can't believe an editor okay'd this.
We could’ve at least not done that. Like, so much went wrong here but. My god. The names. Why?
To be fair, the whole “Grim is holding back something worse” being retconned is also an ACOTAR holdover, in the sense that in book 1 they kept saying that “Amarantha is only the beginning and there’s so much worse out there” and there really wasn’t. Amarantha was the only worthy Big Bad they ever faced.
Technically be bonecarver and his sister maybe, but again, they werent villains but allies, and nothing bad got out of that old prison thingy.
That could have been worthy big bads in the cave, but true, never happened.
man... when I got the notification for this video I ran like I was running from something
Hahahaha thanks for being here
@@ReadswithRachel your videos are informative, entertaining, and honestly the reason I got back into creative writing again. Thanks for all the work you put in for this channel, it's much appreciated!
Wow I appreciate that so much! Thank you!
I"m just now realising that the character names sound like they belong in a middle grade book
- Oro (gold) Rey (king): Sunling ruler and King of lightlark
- Grimshaw (dark wood) Malvere (falsely): Nightshade ruler, name could not sound more evil
- Celeste (heavenly): Starling ruler
- Azul (blue): Skyling ruler
There's nothing wrong with naming characters to match their role/job, it's just a practice that is better suited to children's books.
I'm in agreement
Didn’t Alex Aster publish a few middle grade books before Lightlark? That would explain why the naming is so childish, because that’s what she’s used to working well.
(Maybe I’m misremembering but I think that was part of the reason why people were mad at her, because she was claiming she was a debut author with 10 years of rejections but in reality she was already a published author with an agent and a few books under the belt.)
@@Misa.misatoyes her first two books were a middle grade duology called Curse of The Night Witch.
Middle school books have better names. The names are actually kn the same level of names of 1st graders
P u xe l233 re s see 330kd832
This honestly sounds like a preteen's first attempt at writing fantasy (i.e. my first attempt at writing fantasy which was just as full of confusing and poorly thought out worldbuilding and clumsy plot progression, plot holes galore, bad descriptions etc etc)
My first attempts at original fantasy at 10-12 were so much like Lightlark's world too: everyone has too many powers entirely for convenience (I think my cringiest was when one character suddenly developed electricity powers entirely to revive another character like a human defibrillator, lol), on-the-nose names, and a setting that sounded cool to me but didn't actually make any sense. To the point where I feel almost like I'm calling out my own younger self by criticizing Lightlark. On the other hand, I didn't have an editor and never made any money off it, so.
did better than this one. This one never finished a single chapter for either of its projects
I want this series to be adapted by Shyamalan.
He is the only one who can possibly understand Aster's yolky genius 🤭
I can not wait for if you try to explain this book to Carlos. Those videos are just
“Ahh time to rewatch my fav bookish comfort videos. Watching Rachel and Carlos rip apart objectively awful books.”
Also I hope you explain the Christmas novella to him around Christmas. Like
“Merry Christmas this novella has weird flying sky sex”
So I was listening to this as I was cleaning my dishes and I thought, “Hm. This sounds like the author actually wanted to create a fantasy webcomic, but thought writing a book would be easier.” AND THEN I LOOKED AT THE SCREEN 😂 There is NO WAY this author doesn’t read Isekai manga/manhwa (those who know, know lmao). She’s not writing a story, she’s writing character designs. A lot of the problems in this series would be mitigated (but not erased) if it were in a visual medium.
Poor writing in comics sometimes gets tolerated if the art is good enough. Subpar art might be tolerated if the story is good enough. When it comes to novels? You can’t “pretty dress” your way out of technical problems.
Writing might be technically “easier” than drawing (as in it’s a skill that’s often more accessible since most of us start learning it early) but that doesn’t mean it’s not still hard af to craft a good story. And I’d say reading books is so much more involved than reading comics (I can say that, I’m an artist). People are gunna notice when something doesn’t make any sense, especially if the prose is bad. they won’t be as willing to overlook mistakes.
Oml you're right cdhjfsghbc
What precisely would you say this has in common with isekai manga/manwha? Possibly somewhat of the setting, but I feel the isekai formula mostly centers around a male power fantasy including harem, and I'm not really seeing that here. I'm moreso seeing the trashy YA I grew up with evident by the "chosen one"/"not like other girls" trope, and the crappy love triangle.
@@amara560 From what I remember of this video I meant aesthetically lol. The descriptions of the characters, the focus on style over substance, character decisions not making any sense, etc… not that there aren’t fantastic isekai stories, but the genre is overrun with melodramatics and bad writing.
Yeah this reads off like a light novel
YA used to be so good 😭 YOUNG GIRLS DESERVE WELL WRITTEN FICTION
This!
School for good and evil 🙌🏼🙌🏼
As a writer, one of my biggest fears is that I will forget when and what important information is revealed and to whom it's given and who said it. As a result, I have endless charts and documents tracking all important info. God help me if I ever wrote an entire book based on forgetting some important information that was revealed in a previous book! I would be mortified.
Same. I'm hoping I get to finish it at all. I give that to this author. She finished what she started. But it should be better writing.
@@Theoccasionalcreator I know editing is expensive, but dang. At least do some! Even if it's just you and a team of beta readers!
Continued proof that she barely had enough of an idea for the first book and was scrambling to construct the second by any means (retconning) necessary.
I remember watching your original review on Lightlark, as well as other reviews of it, and thinking “not only is this book just generally not good, it is also incompetent at being a story and a book.” I’m so pleased that you are getting into that here using actually good writing advice.
Thank you!!
33:52 Like I said in one of Lou's videos, it would be like if I wrote about a Goldling from the Goldling Isle who is greedy, has a hooked nose and works in a bank and has to be taught by "regular" people how to distribute money. I wouldn't be subverting anything; I'd be hurting my own people.
@37:51 - Idk why my gut reaction was to say “Are you lost baby girl?” I’m so disappointed in myself 😅
I just wanted to say that you look SO good with black lipstick!!! Your makeup is always so great
Thank you so much!! I appreciate that
I couldn't take this book seriously because my dog's name is Grimm so every time he was mentioned I would picture my anxiety-ridden Schipperke. 😆
can you pet him for me please
I thank you for your sacrifice because I cannot, in good conscience, give this series money but I still want to know how bad it is lol
I’m here to report from the front lines 🫡
A better way to make this love triangle work would be Grim and Isla actually do love one another. But for plot reasons they both had to forget about it and the love was thinly painted over with antagonism via magic. Oro doesn’t love Isla but for the SAME plot reasons had his legitimate feelings of affection for a daughter figure painted over with love via same magic. Then Isla had her legitimate feelings of the affection of a friend and surrogate dad turned to romantic love. If all three of these set all of this in motion BEFORE the start of the first book and both books were about uncovering all of this and the reasons why they would choose to do this it would make a better book/love triangle. Maybe not a particularly GREAT book, but certainly better and more well thought out/put together.
I absolutely agree. And this is but one small way we could have improved this.
Or how grim and oro were lovers. If they were, they could have a heated dynamic neither grim or oro would tell her and traumatic, but thats why they have that eweird relationship?
I mean make groro canon?! Because they have the best potentional dynamic going on. with no creepy power inbalance.
Th-th-THAT'S what Oro looks like?!? Sure he's immortal, but shouldn't Mr. King of Everybody look a *bit* older than a middle school hall monitor?
Middle school hall monitor 😭😭😭
0:59 Will never forget describing the ocean as soup 😂
A gazpacho? Chowder? I nice minestrone, maybe. We will never know for sure. A shame.
Honestly the whole 'where are they getting the hearts' could very easily be solved with something that Aster already wrote: The starlings, who all die at 25. I dont know what people are doing with the bodies of dead starlings, other than there's probably way more corpses on starling than any other islands just by nature of how these lifespans seem to work, but there eventually becomes the issue of 'where do you put them' and shipping them off to the wildlings seems like an efficient way of solving two problems at once. It would even create an excuse for why Isla would know Celeste despite her isolation and even feel a sense of loyalty for her, given she's helping her people not starve (I fully dont remember how Isla and Celeste met in the first book and honestly dont care). And yeah thats MORBID but if you're going to do this whole "uniquely terrible curses" angle then getting into the details would definitely help sell the idea.
the curses are morbid but they also have to be AESTHETIC!!!
Maybe that's the problem with these books. They want to be aesthetic fantasy like ACOTAR, but they rip off the Hunger Games. The Hunger Games is about a fascist state that murders children to keep their beaten-down subjects in line. The over-the-top fantasy-like fashions of the Capitol were grotesque critiques of capitalist overconsumption and excess. None of that fits with an aesthetic fantasy world.
Your frequent uploads lately have been a GODSEND Rachel. I made the (terrible, stupid, ridiculous) decision to crochet gifts for everyone in my family and it's officially crunch time to get them done, and your videos are always the perfect thing to watch while I do it
I’m so glad! I’ve honestly slowed way down this month so I’m glad to know it hasn’t been too noticeable for everyone lol
[SJM spoilers ahead] From the perspective of someone who unfortunately remembers ACOMAF almost page-by-page, my guess is that the reason everyone assumes Grim is evil is that everyone assumed Rhysand was. In ACOMAF there’s a scene where Feyre spies a map on his wall, and without any context she starts begging him not to invade the human realms. Because his eeeevil reputation precedes him.
This is also why there was a secret off-page marriage that gets dramatically revealed by Grim at the end of book 2. This is exactly what happened at the end of ACOMAF (and also at the end of Empire Of Storms).
And I don’t think I even need to address the whole “She died so he brought her back by forming a bond between them and tethering their life force to one another.”
And then she just pulls a Crescent City at the end with the whole “we actually came from a different world” nonsense, except Alex Aster doesn’t have other series, so nobody cares and this reveal doesn’t matter.
I mean in theory it could be interesting what the outside world is, but she doesnt even give trust she will makes anything worthwhile or enjoyable?!
Thank You! BookTok has lost its mind and needs to stop recommending sequel books like Nightbane and Iron Flame.
Personally I just think booktok needs to ask publishers and authors to hold themselves to higher standards than plot holes
I have been abstaining from other nightbane content…..for the prophecy foretold this day………. 🙌🏻 ❤
Hahahahaha hi Emma glad you’re here
here we go, get your popcorn, start a counter for yolky things, it's time!
6:27 theres just something special when the author cant even get the main characters name right
This is, as the kids say, my Roman Empire!
See for me, this is my nightmare 😂
i'm out of the target audience for YA now but i can't imagine late-teen/early-20's me genuinely enjoying half the booktok trends that get marketed today without putting herself into a reading slump forcing herself to finish 😭
"Silly goose business" is kind of an amazing pull quote.
"I'm going to go drink" mood honestly
I usually feel like I understand the plot of a book pretty well after you explain it, but this one? No clue what’s going on. Sounds like that’s how this series be.
If there is one thing I hate about these royalty-fantasy based YA books is how much the royalty characters are either morons who don't know a goddamn thing despite being a ruler of a people (Isla) or their political situation is so MC centric that it doesn't make any feasible sense when interacting with other rulers (Literally Rhysand and the inner circle).
The lack of idk, state craft, like the way that rulers and states interact with each other, makes this whole attempt at political intrigue stupid and lackluster. We see how Isla (cough Alex Aster cough) has no clue about Wildlings bc of her isolation from the two caretakers/abusers, that's fine and a legit explanation, but then Aster puts no effort into Isla actually learning and doing right by them or the starlings. I'm not saying that it would be interesting to read but this is showing how poorly thought out this is.
But no they have this war thing to fight, even though it was poorly established and why tf would anyone want to fight for a ruler who they don't know and isn't solving your problems that have been a thing for a while. It's insane😮
38:35 lol "parts of the castle" could literally mean like a single tile or a door hinge
"They had to go into the trash, not the children, the bubble wand" had me spitting out my coffee on my keyboard pleaseeee 😭also that lazy line, "she ran like she was running from something," sounds like something i would get tattooed
also, the vomit of magic and powers in this book is enough to make 5 different books with hugely different plots. but the excessive plot holes are too much, you're leaving readers with a lot more question marks than answers or conclusion.
Im at 41:59 and you just said “so we’re 25% in” and I yelled WE’RE WHAT??
36 mins in and i literally guarantee if i tried to run a dnd campaign with this as the plot (as it is, no corrections) i would get absolutely clowned on. i don't think this would've even popped off on wattpad back in the day bro
1:36 re-write:
Isla prowled the castle corridors, her fury rippling off her like waves. Power writhed beneath her skin, begging for an outlet to wreck havoc. She darted through the twisting halls as if pursuers nipped at her heels, magic sparking at her fingertips. Her dagger whipped from its sheath, the cold steel an extension of her panicked grip. Chills rattled her bones; every footstep echoed her pulsing need to flee this place forever.
I simultaneously have great self-esteem when even this can get published (then so can I) and also great horror because THIS can get published?? Her writing makes me feel literally nothing except sometimes confusion, which makes me annoyed. Great video as always dude!
I love that the sponsor became an interactive sponsor; she used her skill share class knowledge!
Btw
I hope you recover well from your renal aka kidney infection.
You mentioned after ghosts were introduced that too much was going on. I don't think that's the issue. Fantasy worlds should be rich and immersive. The problem with Aster is that there is no depth or connections between aspects of her world-building. She just takes a bunch of concepts that she likes and whip-stiches everything together without much thought. So when she introduces something new, it feels like it came out of nowhere rather than adding another interesting layer to the world. It falls back on the fact that she's an awful writer, that and I'm convinced her editor is actively doing Aster dirty. 🤣 The prose are so bad, at what point can we start talking about sabotage? 🤣🤣
“She ran like she was running from something-“
GIRL I- Why are you running?!? 🤣
Something that has been bothering me with books like Lightlark and Nightbane is that some publishers and writers are pushing for YA/Teen books to appeal (and marketing) to mostly 20 years old and older (maybe cause these publishers and writers see that teens are not as likely to have a stable disposable income especially in this messed up economy) and to the detriment of teen readers who are more than smart enough to be annoyed knowing when books are being written and marketed for a different audience than them but claiming its for their demographic.
Then the publishers chose to price out those teen readers out of books meant for them by refusing to release the paperbacks for the new releases of YA/Teen books and the book industry wonder why it is having a hard time getting newer readers and being able to keep them. It's madness I tell you.
I think about my fav childhood books, books I think are well written, like The Phantom Tollbooth, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, and the Wrinkle in Time series. Compare those to "She ran like she was running from something". Those are actually in the Kids' section, versus this as YA. That's one hell of a downslide.
I find it hilarious that despite your profile picture being from Harry Potter, you didn't list it as well written. Even putting aside the unfortunateness of JKR, those books' quality really isn't as good as we all remember ("'Snape!' ejaculated Slughorn" and all that lmao)
Wait why did I just get that the "savagery" of heart eating is how colonizers described Aztecs for their religious cultural practices of heart sacrifices. It didn't fully click to me until 50:45
a braver writer would've killed isla off, made an oro x grim romance, and made oro black (i honest to goodness thought oro was black in every review i've watched)
I probably will read that book . I’m so tired of straight romance in YA novels
There was actually an ACOTAR fanfic with similar premise at one point. Considering that Aster is ripping off Sara j. Maas, this is the next best thing.
I feel like I lost brain cells listening to the plot of this book. What even? I can't believe you made it all the way through.
Me neither 😂 but like you, I DNFed empire of the vampire because there’s a book I couldn’t make it through
@@ReadswithRachel omg empire of the vampire is so bad lol
Absolutely atrocious
dear lord the flare thing irks me so much cuz I see potential for it!! having it be for people in high standing can work and have the flares correlate to what they need when theyre under an extremely pressured situation!! oros being able to tell lies can make sense if ppl are vying for his power, grims teleporting can work for an unstable safety i can see some potental and it upsets me
i appreciate you so much for bringing tangible aspects from your sponsor reads into the rest of the video. that is testament that this service is actually worth my time
This just sounds like a SJM knockoff. As in, nothing makes sense or really happens.
I've never had the urge to read either of these books, but listening to this just cements that thought. I feel like I've definitely read far better fanfiction than this convoluted plot of characters and attempted world building.
This was wacky as hell, you really are the bravest among us for putting yourself through this ridiculous book. Thank you for the unhinged plot summary, hope you read something amazing soon to cleanse the palette!
I’m reading Spin of Fate by AA Vora and it’s SO MUCH BETTER than this nonsense
I hate how every time Aster touches a touchy topic like indigenous people (and subsequently reservations), chattel slavery, what seems like a poor understanding of the Underground Railroad (or maybe it was just a coincidence), child abuse, abuse from romantic partner, grooming, monarchies , having diaspora despite living on the same land as your people etc. she manages to mess it up. It’s at best something she ignores like everything about Grim and at worse makes you wonder what type of person she is in real life. Like why where the Starlings, whom have gone through literal hundreds of years of chattel slavery, suddenly looking at Isla like a literal goddess/savior. As if the Wildlings wouldn’t be the biggest offenders of their enslavement. I mean the math still ain’t mathing but the Wildlings eating Starling hearts wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination. Just look at what slave owners did in real life and remember that they don’t even have a curse.
Edit: going off the assumption that the Wildlings were definitely big offenders of Starling’s slavery they would also know how to do agricultural. Or at least the slaves would. Because if you keep killing slaves you’re going to need new ones and since this is chattel slavery breeding farms would be a thing and you need food for that. Also we know that starling slaves were at least around Wildlings because of that whole off-brand Underground Railroad thing that’s mentioned when at the wildling palace… Aster never thought twice about the implications of Starlings going through slavery and and Wildlings literally needing hearts to eat and it shows. The fact that there aren’t certian sects/tribes of Wildlings known for having a robust slave trade and organ market is crazy.
I really enjoyed your "collab" with the skillshare guy and your applying what you learned in his course to your review of this book. Was a very good format, I appreciate you doing the work to analyze...it's clearly more than this book deserves, but still...👍😁💜
Thank you for being here!
6:17 no no no no no absolutely not! Alex Aster, don't you dare look me in the eye and tell me that her name is "Iz-la" and not "Eye-la"
That is just insulting!
yay yay i was looking forward to this review!!! also after just reading lightlark (for the bit lol) i think you're 100% right about oro/isla having no relationship ground to stand on. also grim wiping her memories only to flirt with her. like. how rad would it have been for grim to keep distance and pine from afar while isla slowly falls for oro & is unable to deny the fact that she's weirdly attracted to this other guy who won't give her the time of day but is actually working behind the scenes to help her (grim)?? and then when we find out at the end they were together isla is like "no, i could've never loved you. you aren't as *good* as oro" blah blah blah playing into grim's insecurities and yeah
no idea what the plot of the second book is yet (i'm only 16 mins into the video so far) & not that i think there's an ounce of potential in this idea, but your critiques just inspired/got me thinking. your mind❤
As you were talking about the characters having no reason to be in love and the fact that we never saw the actual unfolding of the relationship, I had a strange epiphany.
Does this kind of "we just met and are in love now" happen so often in lazily written, tropey books as a result of compulsory heteronormativity? This might be a reach, but if it's a given to a straight person that the universal experience is "You Will Meet a Boy/Girl and Love Happens" with little complication, some authors may not feel the need to fill in the gaps. "Don't worry about how, this is A Thing That Happens so I wrote it down because characters do that in stories." I'd think this would be especially true if they are very young authors with relatively little life experience.
Again, I feel like I might be reaching, this could be too broad a statement to make, but I feel like this comment section might feel me.
As a disclaimer, I am not assuming to know Aster's sexuality and am fully aware that comphet absolutely can hit any one of us without us knowing, no matter where we land.
I think you hit the nail on the head
No, that's definitely it. In nearly 30 years of consuming media I can definitely tell the double standards with how queer and straight relationships are accepted by the audience. A cis woman and cis man often have to just stand next to each other or make prolonged eyecontact to be accepted, and queer relationships need a whole arc and dissertation to even be considered as valid.
I think that's why so many of us like friends to lovers and enemies to lovers. The author is promising an actual journey to the relationship, not just Love At First Sight Instant Perfection Everything is Fine (and also usually Toxic)
@@chelscaraand then you get these type of enemies to lovers wjere they lust after each other while pretending to hate each other.
i cannot emphasize enough how much more interesting the character descriptions of "If she cant end the curse this centennial will be her last" and "his smile is a mask and his jewels are deception" sound at least on the surface and how lightlark could've at least have been a passable plot & even romance if those were our main characters. like a protagonist who has an actual life or death reason to want to save her people and herself and has a reason to be clueless bc theres no adults paired with a love interest who's cunning but actually laughs and jokes and flirts with a smile instead of a scowl? almost revolutionary at this point
Thank you for clarifying that the bubble wand went in the trash and not the children 😂
Hahaha I felt like I HAD to
58:03 made me audibly laugh out loud 😭. I was just editing some writing w this playing on the side and it took me so off guard.
it's a Christmas miracle 🙇🏻♀️🙌🏻🏃🏻♀️ so keen to watch this so I can giggle and kick my feet at the nonsense whilst not having to suffer through it myself❤️
Happy to be of service hahaha merry christmas!
I got in on your last month offer. I love Skillshare now. I just learned how to e-paint. Thank you!
Omg i love hearing this!! I want to learn how to do this as well, e-painting seems like it could be a fun thing to do while audiobooking
Wouldn't it be hilarious if they weren't actually eating human hearts and were just eating beets or something and there was a translation error? The whole kingdom could be vegetarian and everyone thinks they're cannibals because they eat something that they named based in its resemblance to a heart.
It’s stuff like this that makes me want to read fanfics of this book series. I’m sure that LightLark will be one of the series where the source material/cannon stuff sucks but the fanfics are god-tier
THANK YOU for calling her eye-la. My brain couldn’t take it anymore
You know what I hate about all this…the book titles are actually pretty eye catching!!
What is a lightark,what is a nightbane,I like book titles that make me curious about what it means and what it could be about before picking it up to read the description.
Alex your good at making neat titles,but you gotta improve your craft girl,we’re not hating on your work,we want you to improve and be better
I can't believe they confirmed her name is pronounces Eyes-la. That's... not how you say it.
Source: I'm Isla
are you running like you're running away from something?
These books sound straight up like a fever dream. Not a god damn bit of it makes sense.
N O N E of it. Not a lick of sense.
I’m 1:36 in and you just put the paragraph up. I’m a writing teacher for middle school/junior high. When I get a sentence like that, I cross out the THREE similes and tell them they can only use one. Then, they must change the other descriptors. They can make one a metaphor and possibly use alliteration or personification for another. They would also need to change the verbs to strong verbs (we have a list) and use strong adjectives/adverbs (also lists available). Plus, they would be told the sentence construction is unacceptable. Sorry for the lesson. I might use this as an example of bad writing for my students and have them make it better. They LOVE doing that.
Don't say sorry because this is SO. VALIDATING. I had so many people tell me on tiktok that that is just "typical YA writing" and I was pulling my hair out.
@@ReadswithRachel that’s disheartening. I don’t think it’s typical for YA. It might be typical for her readers, but I do think a majority of YA authors take their work seriously and work just as hard and YA readers deserve well written books. It’s not a throw away industry like, ‘you go sit at the kids table with the crayons and glitter’.
6:00 "they had to go in the trash....not the children, the bubble wand" PLEASE LMAO this had me giggling
Some thoughts as I watch your video:
Why are they letting a nineteen year old girl rule TWO kingdoms?
Since the curse is broken I guess people can visit lightlark but what was keeping people from lightlark except for the centennials? The curses?
I swear she just comes up with random stuff as she writes which is fine but you need to decide what is actually important to character development and the plot.
This could’ve been so much better if she didn’t try to shove so much into two books.
Altogether, I’m just disappointed by what this series is. I remember when she first started promoting Lightlark on TikTok before it got published. It seemed like a really cool concept.
It could've been one book! EASILY. How is it three???
@@ReadswithRachel More money I’m assuming. From the writing of these books, I don’t believe she’s doing this out of a love for writing. It’s for fame and money it seems like. I hope I’m wrong but I get weird vibes from her now
I think everybody feels that way now because of her relentless and very particular type of marketing that she does. When you hear other authors, talking about their books, they normally comment on like what was important to them to write into the characters and what was important to write into the book theme wise. I have never seen an interview with her or a single tick-tock where she does that and I always wonder why because I can’t think of a single other author who markets like this. It makes me wonder if she cares what’s in her book.
I know Isla wasn’t affected by the Wildling curse, but it would’ve made more sense if she was. Because then the reason Grim wiped her memory could’ve been to prevent her killing him because she was in love with him.
I wonder if Alex Aster wanted to title these books "Lightling" and "Nightling", but that was the only thing her editor said no to.
(side note this video didn't show up in my subscription box, which was weird because that's never happened before.)
This is the Mystery Science Theater 3000/RiffTrax of books I don't want to read. Thank you for the entertainment.
Thanks for being here!
That line about you not needing to make the audience care about the character, just their motivations/objective is so true. It's how a lot of detective fiction works, imo. Like I love Agatha Christie's stuff, but most of her characters are just forgettable characterchures, which is perfectly fine because the entire point of their existence is to be a piece in the mystery.
Also hard agree on YA stuff being fine. I haven't been a fan of the more recent trends in YA and largely avoid it now, but many of my favorite books are YA. Uglies by Scott Westerfield and The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud come to mind. I'm currently rereading East by Edith Pattou and that's definitely YA, but still highly enjoyable.
37:19 "the skin of her stomach" being "scraped clean" is so nonsensical that I assumed she'd been so violently seasick on the journey that her roiling stomach acid had worn down the sides of her stomach...so yeah bad writing if two different people get completely different vibes.
me 40min into the video: WE'RE ONLY 25% IN?!?!?!
Finally! I had this video ripped from my greedy hands two days ago.
I am SO SORRY I failed so hard
Commenting for algorithm and for love for Rachel for suffering through this!!!
At least the Divine Rivals sequels coming out this month!! Hopefully it will cancel out the ick from reading Nightbane
Thanks for boosting!
I‘m just reading „Reviews are for beetles“ and that’s fine too. Books for bugs.
But also no more lightlark.
The beetles are watching like “finally!!!!”