Blog Archive

OFFICIAL AUTHOR BIO: Georgia Summers is a half-British, half-Trinidadian writer. She spent most of her life living across the world, including Russia, Colombia, the USA, Scotland, and briefly Switzerland. She is still bad at languages.

She has previously worked as an editor, a bookseller and rare books student librarian, so you could say she’s seen the entire lifecycle of a book.

When she’s not doing bookish things, she enjoys embroidery, playing piano, and painting, among various other crafts. She currently lives in London, but she dreams of one day living in a haunted château with cats and a ghost that cleans.

FORMAT/INFO: The City of Stardust was published by Redhook Books in the U.S. and by Hodder and Stoughton in the U.K, in January 2024. It is available in ebook, hardback, and audiobook formats.

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: The City of Stardust by Georgia Summers is a contemporary adult fantasy debut with city hopping, a cursed family, and a greedy cosmic power.

I'm always the reviewer who is complaining about how a book could've been edited to be much smaller, and argues to the tune of "Was this book really necessary?". A lot of it is down to my personal preference for short, compact, to the point prose and a well-told story contained within a single book. If possible, of course. But here, this is one of the first books where my opinion goes in a very different direction.

This book is about the Everly's, who are unfortunate enough to have an ancestor who failed to keep up with a bargain he made to a magical scholar millenia ago, so every generation loses a child to her. Come Violet's turn, her uncles who raised her after her mum. disappeared do their best to put it off, and the entire story is about the resulting chase.

The author uses an unconventional narrative style that makes the book extremely atmospheric, which made it seem like I had an ominous shadow looming over me all of the time I had this cracked open. This might not make it suitable for all audiences, but the ones who are familiar with the genre might really enjoy it, and even get hooked onto it. She uses some beautiful phrases and definitely has a way with words, and this stood out particularly in the first half of the book. Unfortunately, it didn't keep up, particularly at points where the book hurtled towards the conclusion of Violet's high stakes effort to get rid of this curse.

Though I liked the pace and structure, the different threads in the present narrative feel very disjointed, almost like someone hastily removed pages of the book to reduce the wordcount. It might make more sense here to tell you that it's not just Violet Everly who is the protagonist, there's also Aleksander, who is the one with slightly lesser page time. This is the bit that made me feel like the book would've been more effective and actually show more than the telling it currently does, if it were really fleshed out into something much thicker, or even a part of a duology, to help get me more invested in the characters, who have simply fallen flat right now. As did the romance, which could've again been so much better than the token element it was.

I did really enjoy the ideas presented by the author, as well as the lore that the Everly curse is built around. I did quite live for those bits, plus, the descriptions of the magical city of the scholars. While the half-hearted romance element slackens the tension in the curse-breaking quest, I did have pangs of sympathy for the stark difference between the dreams Violet had for her life and the reality of it's loneliness, of her wanting an adventure and ending up with one extremely dangerous and life-threatening, while the cosmic goddess Penelope and her assistant Alexander searched for an alternate entrance to their lost realm. The search makes up for the things that bog down the novel, and the descriptions of the present scholar city, Fidelis, as well as everything about the magical element that allows for all the city hopping, were awe-inducing and tided me over the rough parts. The final reveal was an anticlimatic miss.

CONCLUSION: Georgia Summers can clearly write, and has a lot of potential to create fantasy worlds to draw readers into a high stakes adventure. I'll definitely follow her career eagerly, but the unconvincing romance, heavy reliance of metaphor, and the lack of strong editing makes The City of Stardust an underwhelming fantasy debut.