Lacrima’s review of Starling House > Likes and Comments
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Seeing some of the reviews for this has been disappointing. I love The Ten-thousand Doors of January, The Once and Future Witches, and most of her short work.
J.E. wrote: "Seeing some of the reviews for this has been disappointing. I love The Ten-thousand Doors of January, The Once and Future Witches, and most of her short work."
I'm definitely willing to give any of her other books a try. The Ten-thousand Doors of January and The Once and Future Witches are books from her that are already on my TBR and will stay there. It's not like this book put me off the author, it's just... This was definitely not a book for me.
Maybe I'm simply too old and thus not the target demographic? It's more of a YA/NA book, I'd say - it definitely is for me when I look at the story and, even more so, the character development.
It might also be just another case of "the blurb did this book a massive disservice"? And all the hype around it didn't help either. Both made me expected a truly exceptional book. What I got was mildly mediocre at best, with quite some passages that didn't even live up to that.
I wouldn't, in general, advise anyone against reading this, but I also would not recommend this book to anyone, most certainly not to anybody who wants a book with more than superficial depth for story and characters; aside of the FMC almost nobody got a decent background story, not even the MMC - I cannot stand this -, and even the background for the FMC stays pretty much on the surface.
I'd say this book had a lot of potential that sadly did not got developed [enough] and thus a potentially great book became a rather mediocre one. Which always is a bit worse than a book that never had any of that potential to begin with, at least in my book.
Somebody called this 'a book of almosts' in their review, and I think that sums it up perfectly.
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J.E.
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Jan 26, 2026 06:24AM
Seeing some of the reviews for this has been disappointing. I love The Ten-thousand Doors of January, The Once and Future Witches, and most of her short work.
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J.E. wrote: "Seeing some of the reviews for this has been disappointing. I love The Ten-thousand Doors of January, The Once and Future Witches, and most of her short work."I'm definitely willing to give any of her other books a try. The Ten-thousand Doors of January and The Once and Future Witches are books from her that are already on my TBR and will stay there. It's not like this book put me off the author, it's just... This was definitely not a book for me.
Maybe I'm simply too old and thus not the target demographic? It's more of a YA/NA book, I'd say - it definitely is for me when I look at the story and, even more so, the character development.
It might also be just another case of "the blurb did this book a massive disservice"? And all the hype around it didn't help either. Both made me expected a truly exceptional book. What I got was mildly mediocre at best, with quite some passages that didn't even live up to that.
I wouldn't, in general, advise anyone against reading this, but I also would not recommend this book to anyone, most certainly not to anybody who wants a book with more than superficial depth for story and characters; aside of the FMC almost nobody got a decent background story, not even the MMC - I cannot stand this -, and even the background for the FMC stays pretty much on the surface.
I'd say this book had a lot of potential that sadly did not got developed [enough] and thus a potentially great book became a rather mediocre one. Which always is a bit worse than a book that never had any of that potential to begin with, at least in my book.
Somebody called this 'a book of almosts' in their review, and I think that sums it up perfectly.
