This read like a story that couldn’t decide whether to be Beauty and the Beast*, Narnia, or a Disney collage, and ended up being the most average and derivative Romantasy you could think of.

At first, the story is appealing because of its plot premise: In a world of perpetually dark mountains where the sun doesn’t shine, a class of beings with magical powers called Starmakers are responsible for bringing sunlight to make life possible for the human settlements in those regions and provide them with food. In one of these villages, Reverie, lives the daughter of a hard-working widow, who has a sister sick with Frost, an illness caused by the cold and darkness. How will she survive in this harsh world? By marrying well and hunting well. She is engaged to a man she doesn’t love but needs for the sake of her family.

One day, Aurora goes to the mountains and conveniently “forgets” that it’s illegal to hunt snow stags. Someone who appears to be magical and is otherworldly beautiful appears, and he reminds her that hunting is illegal, that she has magical powers in her blood because “the sun is in her veins,” and that she must go with him to his enchanted castle to learn how to use her innate magic, or she will die a horrible death.

And that’s only the third chapter.

And everything goes to hell from there until the epilogue.

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