Colleen Mondor Reviews The City of Stardust by Georgia Summers
The City of Stardust, Georgia Summers (Redhook 978-0-316-56148-8, $29.00, hc, 352 pp) January 2024.
The City of Stardust by Georgia Summers blends our recognizable world, mostly through the home of the Everly family in the English countryside, with the fictional city of Fidelis, a place of academics and magic that hides a horrific truth. (And that horror really is bad; we’re talking ritual-sacrifice-of-kidnapped-children kind of bad.) Violet Everly lives with her uncle Ambrose in their gently decaying home, enjoying occasional visits from a second, more mysterious uncle, and pining over the loss of her mother, Marianne, who disappeared one dark and stormy night. Violet’s world is safe and scholarly in a ‘‘here’s the library, read whatever you want’’ kind of way, but also necessarily small as her uncles grapple with the massive family curse, which is looming large over Violet’s future. At the center of that curse is Penelope, mysterious denizen of Fidelis, a powerful and vindictive force who seems to hate all things Everly for no particular reason. (Yes, there is a reason.) (It’s complicated.) The entire plot hinges on Violet’s attempt to find her mother, learn what she knows, and break the curse. If she cannot accomplish that, then she will die and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
I was very quickly attracted by the language of The City of Stardust; Summers’s writing is gorgeous, and every page offers up more for the reader to love. Consider this passage as Violet imagines Fidelis:
Her mind is already conjuring a city full of potential libraries crammed wall-to-wall with books, adventures only a step through a doorway. Even though it’s something she’s supposed to have outgrown, she can’t help the thrill that runs through her.
To the effervescent sea under the sun. To the witches in their forests. To mysteries beyond comprehension.
As Violet travels the world in search of Marianne, Summers layers on the descriptions, making each building and city more beautiful and intriguing than the last. The party descriptions are epic, as are the clothes and the food. Even the awful Penelope leaps off the page under the author’s talented hand.
In the midst of all the describing is a plot that sets Violet on the expected collision course with her nemesis and also an unexpected romance with Penelope’s assistant. (This is not a spoiler; you can see that enemies-to-lovers relationship from a mile away.) Marianne, unfortunately, is never more than a whisper in all this; I would have loved to see more of her. I was also disappointed by the reveal behind the curse. As a mystery spurring Violet on through the text, it suggests some great drama but in the end is actually all a bit pedestrian despite all the pain it has caused. Readers who relish the why and how may be disappointed by The City of Stardust, which never quite manages to explain itself. It is a singular reading experience – just not, perhaps, the one I was looking for; it didn’t feel complete to me.
This review and more like it in the June 2024 issue of Locus.
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