Lead Review (The City of Stardust)
- Book: The City of Stardust
- Location: Europe, Moscow
- Author: Georgia Summers
The City of Stardust by Georgia Summers, novel set across Europe, Moscow and fantasy locations.
Settings: Prague, Paris, Vienna, Moscow and fantasy locations
City of Stardust by Georgia Summers is a wonderful, diverting fantasy novel which switches between real-life locations and fantasy worlds. The author has top-level world-building skills – think Terry Pratchett or Philip Pullman – and her characters are fascinating. The book is gently paced. I found this enjoyable, as it allows the reader time to absorb the detail of the story and creates contrasts with the moments of tension and horror. Possibly the storyline wanders a little too much near the end, but the conclusion is satisfying.
The book opens dramatically: a woman, identified only by her vanilla scent, stealing babies from cities across Europe. We switch to the main character, Violet Everly, and gradually learn that she’s a young girl growing up with her uncles, Gabriel and Ambrose Everly, because her mother has left home. Violet has been told that her mother has gone on an adventure, and expects her back, but years pass and Marianne doesn’t return. Violet has little contact with the outside world, learning about it from books in the library of her isolated Gothic home. It becomes apparent that her uncles are keeping her safe and she discovers that the Everly Curse means her life is in danger. She is the latest in a line of first-born Everlys and those who went before have been taken as part of a bargain struck by Ever Everly, her distant ancestor.
When Violet is finally offered a little freedom, she meets, and is entranced by, a young man called Aleksandr. She recalls him visiting her years before, when he appeared to perform magic with a marble made of a mysterious material called reveurite that showed her the stars. On that occasion, the woman he was assistant to, Penelope, scolded him for what he’d done. Aleksandr is to become the source of help – and of betrayal – for Violet.
Violet learns that her mother’s absence means that her own life is in jeopardy. With time running out, she decides to go on her own adventure: she must find her mother and put an end to the curse. She has no idea what she is getting into.
The author describes the sights, scents and sounds of her locations beautifully, whether they are real-life capital cities or imagined settings. The Everly home is in an unnamed location in England, we assume, and characters visit such places as Prague, where Summers notes the well-known landmarks, only to create doorways to her fantasy realms. There are some fun references to other fantasy novels (though I’m not well-read in the genre, I could recognise that wardrobes play an important role in CS Lewis’s Narnia, for example.)
This is a beautifully written book, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and I’m just left feeling so sad that I will never hold a reveurite marble of my own.
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