11 June 2020

All the Stars and Teeth / Adalyn Grace


1/5

All the Stars and Teeth started off strong with a determined lead, Amora, who has a magical power that is much darker than most YA powers. Unfortunately, that was the only original aspect of this novel. The rest of it includes cliches like Amora running off with a handsome "pirate" to "save her kingdom," finding out that the dad that she's looked up to is actually a liar, and that her arranged fiancĂ© actually has feelings for her. 

In her journey, she experiences a jumble of miscellaneous encounters, none of which are particularly intriguing. All of it is very standard for a YA fantasy novel: feeling out of place as a princess in a tavern, easily slaying a mystical ocean beast, rescuing a mermaid from bad men, and finding out that the villain isn't as villainous as he seems. I could go on. It was all very predictable and boring; by the end of the novel I was skimming so fast I was reading one word a page, and I could still follow the storyline.

I will give points for how gory her power is, how they would cut off limbs from one of the characters who had the ability to regenerate limbs so that Amora could use his bones. That lack of squeamishness is relatively rare in YA novels. But overall, there are much better versions of this novel out there, such as Natalie Parker's Seafire

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