When Alex Aster announced her first adult romantasy, expectations were already enormous. Her young adult Lightlark series had earned a devoted following and the kind of overnight success most authors only dream about. Starside by Alex Aster lands as a bold, blood-soaked promise: that the worlds she builds will only grow darker, more dangerous, and considerably more explicit. For the most part, that promise holds.
A World Cleaved in Two
Before the characters take a single step, the world itself earns its keep. Starside opens in Stormside — a half of a once-unified land now stripped of magic, fertile soil, and hope. While the immortals of Starside live in gilded abundance, mortals on this side fight for scraps, pray for rain that never comes, and bury children who starved before they could walk. This asymmetry isn’t mere backdrop. It is the marrow of the book, the grievance that makes every act of violence feel earned.
The worldbuilding here is Aster’s most assured to date. The Questral — a deadly ritual every fifty years that allows fifty mortal challengers to journey through Starside’s gates — is an elegant narrative engine. It explains the book’s high stakes without requiring lengthy exposition. The Culling, the ancient swords that choose their wielders, the creatures of Starside that can be claimed like weapons: all of it is rendered with the confidence of someone who has lived inside this mythology for years. Aster is clearly interested in what power does to people who have too much of it and what it costs those who have none at all.
Aris: Forged in Fire
The success of Starside by Alex Aster rests almost entirely on Aris, and she earns that trust with her fists and her fury. An orphaned blacksmith’s apprentice from a village burned to ash by a goddess who didn’t even consider it worth remembering, Aris arrives at the Questral with nothing but a dagger made of impossible steel, a decade of grief hammered into something sharp, and a plan to kill the gods themselves.
She is not a soft protagonist. She is suspicious, sardonic, and sometimes ruthless. But she is also someone who cannot look away from a child standing alone in a crowd of killers, who quietly braids a stranger’s hair in a rocking boat and calls it nothing. The contradiction between who she needs to be and who she still is forms the emotional engine of the story, and Aster never lets that tension go slack. Aris’s voice crackles off the page — short, sharp sentences when danger presses in; something rawer when grief finally catches up with her.
A Found Family Worth Fighting For
Two characters join Aris early and refuse to let go: Kira, a red-haired fighter whose love for her ailing sister gives the quest its most human stakes, and Zane, a Great House heir who left his mountain with more curiosity than plan. The three form a found family in the oldest, most satisfying sense of the term. Their pact — made with blades touching in a clearing — carries real weight, and the moments between them offer necessary breathing room between the carnage.
That said, Kira and Zane ultimately give more to Aris than they receive from the narrative. Their individual arcs feel truncated, as if the book ran out of space for them. Readers who fall in love with them may find themselves wishing for chapters from their perspectives. This is less a flaw than an opportunity for sequels, but it does leave their inner lives feeling underdeveloped compared to the careful attention given to Aris.
The Enemies-to-Lovers Arc That Actually Earns It
If Aris is the blade, Harlan Raker is the whetstone. Head of the king’s guard, cloaked in a silver mask and a reputation for leaving no survivors, Raker is precisely the kind of antagonist who is magnetic before you know anything real about him. The dynamic between Aris and Raker is the romantic spine of the novel, and Aster handles the slow burn with more patience than many authors dare. Days of mutual contempt and enforced proximity build into something genuinely charged.
Their verbal sparring lands with the same precision as their actual sword fights. He is insulting when words cost nothing; she refuses to show fear when fear is all she has. The tension between them is earned through dozens of small, telling moments — his unexplained knowledge of her name, the grudging food shared in a poisoned forest, the way he trains alone in the dark and she watches and decides to get better anyway.
What Works, and What Strains
The book’s clearest strengths:
Aris is one of the most distinctive first-person voices in recent romantasy — specific, funny when she shouldn’t be, and devastating when she isn’t
The action choreography is exceptional; the Culling sequence is one of the most propulsive openings in the genre in years
The world’s political inequality is woven naturally into every scene rather than delivered as exposition
The romantic tension between Aris and Raker is built slowly enough that when it breaks, it feels inevitable
Where Starside by Alex Aster invites fair criticism:
Aris’s internal monologue, one of the book’s greatest pleasures, can become repetitive in the middle third as she reminds herself of her mission in nearly identical terms chapter after chapter
Once the romantic relationship shifts, the pacing accelerates sharply, and some emotional groundwork gets compressed; the transition from simmering hostility to physical intimacy moves faster than the trust it implies
The ending arrives as a hard cliffhanger — well-executed, but readers who prefer resolution within a single volume may find it frustrating
The Prose: Sharp as Starside Steel
Aster writes action with exceptional clarity. She has a talent for setting up a scene’s physical geometry so that the reader never loses track of who is where, which is rarer than it sounds in combat-heavy fantasy. The prose relaxes beautifully when the world earns it. The Prism Pass sequence, where mountains stand like rows of armored knights and waterfalls carry rainbows between their blades, shows Aster at her most lyrical. These moments of beauty feel deliberate — they make the ugliness surrounding them sharper by contrast.
If You Loved This, Read These
Readers drawn to Starside by Alex Aster will likely enjoy:
From Blood and Ash by Jennifer L. Armentrout — for the enemies-to-lovers tension wrapped in immersive world-building
A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas — for immortal courts, escalating stakes, and romantic fury
The Jasad Heir by Sara Hashem — for a revenge-driven heroine concealing a dangerous secret identity
Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan — for a quest fantasy that doesn’t sacrifice emotional depth
The Bridge Kingdom by Danielle L. Jensen — for political intrigue folded into slow-burn romance
And naturally, Alex Aster’s own Lightlark series serves as an excellent companion piece, showing how her world-building instincts have grown from a contained island to an entire divided civilization.
The Verdict
Starside by Alex Aster is a confident, propulsive adult romantasy debut that delivers where it matters most: a protagonist worth following into darkness, a romance that earns its heat through accumulated tension rather than narrative convenience, and a world with real teeth beneath its glittering surface. Its weaknesses are largely a sequel’s opportunities — secondary characters left with room to grow, a mythology with obvious depth still to be explored. The ending arrives like a blade through stone, leaving you shaken and immediately wanting the next chapter. That hunger is, by any measure, the highest compliment a first entry in a series can earn.