• Genre: Fantasy
• Age group: Adult
• Pub. date: Feb 16 2021
• Format:  Audiobook
• Pages: 299
• Goodreads link

With Soulstar, C. L. Polk concludes her riveting Kingston Cycle, a whirlwind of magic, politics, romance, and intrigue that began with the World Fantasy Award-winning Witchmark. Assassinations, deadly storms, and long-lost love haunt the pages of this thrilling final volume.

For years, Robin Thorpe has kept her head down, staying among her people in the Riverside neighborhood and hiding the magic that would have her imprisoned by the state. But when Grace Hensley comes knocking on Clan Thorpe’s door, Robin’s days of hiding are at an end. As freed witches flood the streets of Kingston, scrambling to reintegrate with a kingdom that destroyed their lives, Robin begins to plot a course that will ensure a freer, juster Aeland. At the same time, she has to face her long-bottled feelings for the childhood love that vanished into an asylum twenty years ago.

Can Robin find happiness among the rising tides of revolution? Can Kingston survive the blizzards that threaten, the desperate monarchy, and the birth throes of democracy?

This was so good. So so good. In every way the perfect ending to the trilogy. Robin is by far my favorite main character in the series. She’s amazing, driven, competent, smart, compassionate, she struggles, she’s kind, everything, I love her with all my heart. I’ve been looking forward to her PoV for ages and it was everything I’d hoped for. Especially in contrast with Grace who’s blindspots could be so frustrating. And I liked how the story went for her because she starts off as the one in background that gets everything done, but then a lot of people acknowledge her skills and she gets the credit she’s due. She’s a force to be reckoned with.

Soulstar was so emotional and tense. It made me cry so much, I’m a very emotionally repressed individual, so I don’t get that a lot. It was so tense, with so many things going wrong that I kept having to put it down. I actually ended up listening to an entire other book because I couldn’t take the tension and then had someone spoil the ending for me just to be able to keep reading. Did really everything have to go from bad worse? So tense. Also Polk’s ending, masterful, just the way everything came together, chef’s kiss.

This book had so much going on. I really felt for Robin having to juggle so much. The world is going through so much politically, and she’s increasingly at the center of that. Her personal life is in turmoil, on the one hand something good happens but it comes with so much sorrow and so different to adjust to. There was a bit where she thinks about how her chance at a certain kind of life was stolen, broken. Politically there’s dealing with Grace, who kinda gets a clue in the sense that acknowledges she’s clueless and wants to hire Robin to clue her in. There are elections coming up and there’s a whole lot of trouble. There’s also a murder mystery to solve and some arson cases, and just so much. And I love how thorough it all Robin doesn’t play, she’s not a moderate, she’s done compromising. I love her with all my heart.

I know this review is a mess, cause this book destroyed me. I don’t want to give away much of the plot because I think that aspect is so well crafted, so many things that build on each other that I wouldn’t want to spoil. It was by far my favorite of the series, even though it took me forever to read. I was initially planning to read it for comfort square, cause I still think of the first book as romance, but it really wasn’t that. I think it’s more like epic fantasy without the sword fighting. It’s a more modern setting, I imagine it kinda 1910s equivalent, but it’s got the monarchy and the traitors and the evil sorcerers. And it’s got so much to say about power and was so happy that this book focussed on the people most hurt by the systems in place. Especially since previously I was frustrated with the glacial pace of change and how powerful rich people got away without proper consequences.

The audiobook is narrated by Robin Miles who is amazing, so strongly recommend that format if you’re into it.

r/Fantasy bingo square: non-binary character, mystery plot (though it’s a side-plot), published in 2021, witches HM