Starside
Alex Aster's first adult romantasy sends a vengeance-driven blacksmith's apprentice into a death game against the gods who took her family, alongside a man she can't read, for an enemies-to-lovers slow burn with real stakes on both fronts.
From the review
Aris walks into the Culling with calluses from a blacksmith's forge and no family sword, standing among heirs of the Great Houses who have both. She's not after what the other forty-nine competitors want. Every fifty years the king opens the gates and lets that many challengers cross into Starside, chasing a well of magic that can heal a person, enrich them, or add years to a life. Aris wants none of it. A goddess burned her village to the ground when she was a child and killed her family, and the only prize Aris cares about is close enough to put a blade through. The rule that drives the plot is simple and mean: the swords that actually hold power in this world aren't inherited or bought, they're claimed, by anyone strong or lucky enough to take one. The day Aris claims hers, she stops being a long shot and starts being a target, for other challengers and immortals alike. Alex Aster builds this out through motion rather than lecture. The reader learns how status and magic work here the way Aris does, mid-fight, with something already trying to kill her, and the pace rarely slows down long enough for a paragraph of history to get in the way. The world she's crossing comes stocked with the genre's usual dangerous furniture, ancient creatures, magic-wielding beasts, dragons, fae, immortals who don't need a weapon to be lethal, but Aster treats all of it as texture rather than a checklist to tick off.
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