Starside

by Alex Aster ★★★★☆

Starside takes place in a land divided. On one side sits Stormside, the impoverished, drought-ravaged land where mortals struggle to survive. Opposite is Starside, which is lush with life and home to the gods and immortals. A set of gates separate the realms, and the gates remain closed at all times with one exception: every fifty years, the "Questral" is held, during which the gates are opened to the first fifty inhabitants of Stormside who can make it through, giving those mortals a chance to claim a goblet of magic that can save lives and change fortunes in Stormside.

Our protagonist is a young woman named Aris, twenty-years-old, and determined to be part of the upcoming Questral, but not for the typical reasons. Aris has no desire for a goblet full of magic. Instead, she's bent on a single objective: enter Starside so that she can kill the goddess who killed her family, and kill all of the other gods while she's at it.

Aris manages to make it into the competition (apologies if that's a spoiler, but this would be a very short book if she didn't), and we're introduced to several other competitors. One of those is her arch-nemesis, Harlan Raker. Raker is the head of the king's guard, and "the most famed knight on Stormside", known for his brutality and lack of mercy. As Aris says, "I should know. I begged him for it, and he remained as cold as he is now as he studies the challengers."

I was entranced by the book, but it felt overly derivative of other works. For starters, the Questral feels eerily reminiscent of the Hunger Games. Like with the Hunger Games, not all competitors are equal, and those associated with "the five Great Houses of Stormside" come with the benefit of wealth and knowledge, similar to Hunger Games' competitors from Districts 1 and 2. Aris comes from the equivalent of District 12, and she bonds with other underdog competitors to form an alliance.

Aris herself feels like an amalgamation of many fantasy characters from the last twenty years. She shares some of the exact traits of Wren Darlington from Silver Elite, down to the silver running through her veins. There are moments and scenes where she identically mimics Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones, and at times she'll likely remind some of Violet Sorrengail from Fourth Wing. With the plot of the novel seeming to borrow heavily from The Hunger Games, she naturally also feels reminiscent of Katniss Everdeen. I felt like I was reading a weird mashup of books and heroines I'd already experienced.

While way too much of Starside felt familiar, it also borrows from a bunch of 5-star books and series; I liked reading all of those underlying works, and so perhaps it makes sense that Starside was a story that I plowed through it in just a few days. The novel maintains a consistent pace, and while Aris's quest can feel a bit repetitive at times (enter a new part of the realm, encounter a slightly different type of beast, barely survive), I was consistently drawn back to the story.

This is a romantasy as well, by the way, and author Alex Aster spends almost the entirety of the book building sexual tension until a (literal) climax near the end and fifteen straight pages of spice. You may be asking yourself, "Fifteen pages...is that a long sex scene?" Given the average is 4-5, the answer is YES. It felt especially drawn out considering how close it came to the end of the book. It was like I was watching the sand spill through the hourglass, powerless to stop it; we were getting closer and closer to the end of the book and they were still fucking. By the time the sex was over, there were a mere 30 pages left to wrap up the 500-page quest, a rapid resolution that felt overly rushed, as if the coupling were the true climax and not the showdown with the gods.

This is a weird one to rate and rank. I had significant issues with it; but, I enjoyed reading it, I kept coming back to the story, and I'm invested in the series. If you can get past the derivations from other books, it's a captivating romantasy novel. I just wish it didn't feel so familiar.

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Quick Facts

• Title: Starside

• Author: Alex Aster

• Publisher: Avon

• Release Date: March 31, 2026

• Format: Ebook

• ISBN-13: 978-0063462410

• Pages: 512