Review – Star Daughter by Shveta Thakrar (3/5 stars)
Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Paranormal
Length: 448 pages
Publisher: HarperTeen
Release Date: August 11, 2020
ISBN-13 : 978-0062894625
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: Owlcrate
Rating: 3/5 stars
“The daughter of a star and a mortal, Sheetal is used to keeping secrets. Pretending to be “normal.” But when an accidental flare of her starfire puts her human father in the hospital, Sheetal needs a full star’s help to heal him. A star like her mother, who returned to the sky long ago.
Sheetal’s quest to save her father will take her to a celestial court of shining wonders and dark shadows, where she must take the stage as her family’s champion in a competition to decide the next ruling house of the heavens—and win, or risk never returning to Earth at all.”
Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I got this book in one of my Owlcrates.
Story (3/5): This whole story is about Sheetal losing her ability to hide that she is half-star and accidentally hurting her father with her star abilities. As a result she is forced to hunt down her mother and the other stars, for help saving her father. The story was a bit all over the place. There are parts of the story I enjoyed, like the magical market and some of the mythology included. However, I ended up mostly just skimming the last 25% of the book because I found the story boring and poorly constructed.
Characters (3/5): I never really engaged with Sheetal or any of the other characters in this book. They were hard to get to know and fairly one dimensional. Sheetal seems very naive and somewhat selfish, as do all of the adult characters in this novel. Sheetal’s crush is just very fan-girlish and I didn’t see a lot of actual affection between her and her boyfriend. All the characters were just kind of “blah”.
Setting (3/5): The setting was okay. Pretty typical YA setting the first part of the book and then Sheetal journeys to the star realm. There is some nice magical description of the star realm but despite this I still had a really hard time picturing the setting. It was okay but nothing exciting.
Writing Style (3/5): This whole book was pretty mediocre and somewhat disappointing for me. I loved the aspects of desi culture and the idea of a character that was half-star. However, the whole story is very immature. The main character is immature, the whole plotline around Sheetal having to win a talent competition is really immature, and the writing was immature. There wasn’t really anything here technically awful, but nothing that piqued my interest and made me want to read more by this author either. I should also mention there is a ton of desi terminology in here I did not know, which made the book even harder to read. It would have been nice to have a glossary of these terms in the back of the book.
My Summary (3/5): Overall this was an okay book, the best part by far was the beautiful cover design. There are some promising elements in here around desi culture and mythology. I also love the idea of having a character that is half-star struggling with her human vs celestial side. However, the execution was severely lacking. The whole thing is immature and unengaging. There was a lot of potential for an amazing story here but it just wasn’t realized.
