Book of the Day

From the review

Lucia Fairfax has been living on borrowed fortune, and in Florescentia the loan comes due. I.V. Ophelia's gothic romantasy drops us into Astraea, a bioluminescent city that prays to the stars, where Lucia works as an inventor and occultist who draws luck out of a place she calls the Otherside. Then a ritual fails. Her husband dies. The luck that kept her comfortable starts to drain away, and the ritual she tries next is a mistake only a desperate person makes. What answers her is Altair, a being the stars themselves made, and the question under the whole book is simple and mean: what does it cost to get your luck back, and who gets to set the price? Altair is the reason to pick this up, and Ophelia knows it. He moves between shadow, monster and human, and when he takes a human shape he borrows the face of Lucia's dead husband, Dorian. Sit with that for a second. It's a seduction with grief built into the architecture, and the book uses the discomfort instead of apologizing for it. He's sarcastic, openly besotted, jealous, hard to read, and every so often cruel. The predator and prey current is where the chemistry lives: feeding, hunger, who holds power in the room, and a bargain the two of them keep renegotiating. The banter is the real surprise. A cosmic being with a taste for sarcasm is funny on the page, and the humor lets the tension bite instead of just loom.