Title: An Accident of Stars
Series: Manifold Worlds #1
Author: Foz Meadows
Genre: Portal Fantasy
Trigger Warnings: Bullying, sexual harassment, “boys will be boys” justification
Read To: 8%
Back Cover:
When Saffron Coulter stumbles through a hole in reality, she finds herself trapped in Kena, a magical realm on the brink of civil war.
There, her fate becomes intertwined with that of three very different women: Zech, the fast-thinking acolyte of a cunning, powerful exile; Viya, the spoiled, runaway consort of the empire-building ruler, Vex Leoden; and Gwen, an Earth-born worldwalker whose greatest regret is putting Leoden on the throne. But Leoden has allies, too, chief among them the Vex’Mara Kadeja, a dangerous ex-priestess who shares his dreams of conquest.
Pursued by Leoden and aided by the Shavaktiin, a secretive order of storytellers and mystics, the rebels flee to Veksh, a neighboring matriarchy ruled by the fearsome Council of Queens. Saffron is out of her world and out of her depth, but the further she travels, the more she finds herself bound to her friends with ties of blood and magic.
Can one girl – an accidental worldwalker – really be the key to saving Kena? Or will she just die trying?
Review:
I’m struggling to put my finger on why I wasn’t enjoying this book. It wasn’t bad. I stopped reading just as it was “getting good” and Saffron made it into the magical world. It just wasn’t gripping me, and I put it down for nearly a month (per my ereader app the last day I opened it was January 19) without feeling any desire to go back.
Which doesn’t make a lot of sense, because on the surfact there are a lot of things I should like. “Character from our world falls into a differerent, more magical one” is almost always a premise I enjoy. Gwen, the “mentor” character who knows how the magical world works, helped put the current leader on the throne and very much regrets it, which is a unique twist. There’s also some casual polyamory with an asexual character who has both a wife and a husband. These are all things that I theoretically should enjoy.
However. A large part of Gwen’s parts are how much she regrets putting Vex Leoden in charge, but it’s not really clear why. Vex doesn’t do anything (although some of his soldiers are trying to catch Gwen, but that’s kinda understandable if she’s trying to take him down), and none of the characters even talk about what he has done. You’re just supposed to accept that he’s bad.
Also, the only reason that Saffron ends up in the magical world in the first place is because she’s suffering sexual harassment and bullying at school and Gwen is literally the only adult who agrees that’s a bad thing and not just “boys will be boys,” and she’s so struck that there’s an adult who takes her seriously that she jumps through a portal after Gwen just so she can talk to her again. I’m not sure how accurate that is to the public school experience, but it was rather upsetting and also seemed like a pretty weak motivation to jump through a whole portal going who-knows-where.
I think overall this book was just missing a “why.” Why Gwen regrets putting Vex Leoden in charge, why Saffron did … anything (I got no connection to her as a character), why I should be invested in this story. It’s very possible that it gets better and I just stopped too soon, but I feel no connection to the story or the characters and no desire to keep reading.
The Manifold Worlds series:
- An Accident of Stars
- A Tyranny of Queens
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