Star Wars Prompts

Starling House by Alix E. Harrow is a Southern gothic novel about an orphaned young woman from a cursed coal town who takes a job at a mysterious local mansion to support her teenage brother, and winds up facing the forces of darkness and the immense weight of the town's past sins while falling in love with the House's surly, reclusive owner.

I absolutely loved this. It has the most likably flawed cast of characters I've read in ages, including the House itself, which very much has its own personality and agency within the story. The treatment of race, gender and sexuality is thoughtful and nuanced. The atmosphere is beautifully derelict and creepy. The prose was lovely, very visual, with just a few pleasingly unsettling little splashes of gore. The fantastical elements are flawlessly interwoven with industrialised modern reality, and the romance...oh my god, the romance. The YEARNING. Eden and Arthur are both desperately lonely and convinced they can't have each other. Eden often compares Arthur to Heathcliff, but to me he's far more of a Rochester - kinder, more moral, and ultimately far more attractive. (Listen. I'm a fake Gothic romance fan and actually don't like Wuthering Heights very much.) If the two of them didn't get an ending I liked, I was going to riot and probably write a million words of fix-it fanfic. As it is, I can close the final page with the satisfaction of having had all my needs met. I borrowed a copy from the library but am going to have to buy my own because I definitely want this on my shelf and available for rereading!

Not Another Love Song by Julie Soto is reskinned Reylo fanfic. I hadn't actually heard of this one before, but I happened to spot it on a shelf at the library and immediately knew what I was looking at from a combination of cover art + blurb by Ali Hazelwood. How could I resist? In this one, Rey Gwen and Kylo Xander are musical prodigies on violin and cello respectively. They both play for the same pops orchestra, but their careers are in very different places: Xander is a rockstar who fronts his own band, while Gwen scrapes by supplementing her orchestra pay with wedding gigs. She happens to play a wedding at which he is a member of the bridal party; he's immediately attracted and expresses it by pulling her metaphorical pigtails; she thinks he hates her and resolves to hate him back. Contrivances of the standard romance novel sort force them together anyway. They fall in love. He fingers her while she sight-reads on the cello. (We're to understand that cello and violin are interchangable instruments when you're as prodigious a prodigy as Gwen or Xander.)

This was such a frustrating read, because it came so close to being something I could really savour. To be honest I don't really see what the main characters have to do with Rey and Kylo - Gwen is a meek little thing with no self-confidence, while Xander is a transparently decent, reasonable person whom Gwen mistakes for genuine bad news because he...um, runs late a lot, and wears Ray-Bans - but that's par for the course with my experience of Reylo fandom, and it still has a broody guy with floppy dark hair and a grovelling obsession with the heroine, so I'm willing to set aside my Star Wars baggage and meet the novel where it's at. I did really enjoy the premise. (I have some biases here: I'm the non-musician from a musical family, so the set dressings tapped into a deep wellspring of childhood emotion, but I have no skin in the game to be annoyed by the wild inaccuracies.) But the pacing was broken in a way that sucked all the joy out of actually reading it. We meandered our way through the set-up at an idle pace, then took the climax and resolution at a flat-out sprint that made next to nothing of all that groundwork. It felt like such a waste. From the author's note, I take it that this book was Soto's first attempt at making the jump from AO3 to pro-pub, and got rejected and rewritten a lot before she eventually had better luck getting her foot in the door with a different work entirely; I think that rocky history shows. This is not a fic that was quite ready to become a novel.