Starlight and Shadows

A Sapphic Cozy Fantasy Romance

By: Vera Winters

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

A scholar’s dream. A pirate’s curse. Only one can be saved.

Illyria’s dream shop is becoming a nightmare. Abandoning her safe but stifling career teaching magic to the elite, the enterprising half-elf sets sail to open her own alchemy store. Illyria yearns to make her shop a bastion of magic for all, but she invokes the wrath of the local crime syndicate and awakens an ancient curse.

Briar knows all about curses. The pirate half-giant’s family has suffered under one for generations. She’s on the hunt for a Celestial Prism, a rare artifact powerful enough to lift her affliction. Yet the infuriating–and alluring–Illyria is after the same Prism, just as Briar’s time is running out.

Briar and Illyria form an uneasy alliance as sinister forces surround them both. But as Illlyria’s grand opening looms, will she save the store of her dreams, or the woman after her own heart?

Starlight and Shadows is the enchanting first standalone book in the Starlight Sanctum cozy fantasy LGBTQ romance series. If you like heartfelt adventures, new beginnings, and an engrossing F/F romance with a touch of heat, then you’ll love Vera Winters’s captivating adventure. Buy Starlight and Shadows to be enchanted today!

A++ for this storyline!!

I loved everything about this book!! My only complaint was the text-to-speech, it was hard to listen to at times. However the story was so good, I binge listened despite that!! I want more!

Great characters

Love the story line! Overall great only downside was the narration!! Hope to see more from this author

The story line was pretty good in general

You know, I am all for AI and stuff, but man, the narration was way too bad. It took me more than half the story to finally learn who was who, since the voice was the same for everyone. Also, as it’s not a surprise, there was no emotion in the narration which made listening to the story a little boring. Overall though, the storyline was pretty ok, it could have been better, but well…

At least it was discounted

This book was so boring it’s probably top 3 meh for me. It’s one of the slowest stories to develop into predictable nothing. I kept listening hoping for something but even at 2x the speed I couldn’t wait for it to finish.

hate virtual voice

sorry line was good, hard to tell who's taking, no inflection in voice, voice doesn't change from person to person, doesn't pronounce words. story was cute but hard to keep up with cuts no changes in voices.

poor virtual voice

inflections were terrible and so many words like bow and bow were misspoke it pulled me out of the story.

The AI voice

The AI voice killed the book for me. I was excited at first but my ADHD brain kept on zoning it out.

depth of characters was great and plot was good but virtual voice took away imagination.

would have enjoyed it more with a narrator. virtual voice ruined it. no emotion.

Loved the book, HATED the narration

It is a CRIME to have virtual voice narrate ANYTHING, much less a delightful little gem like this one. It was spicy without being total smut. There was some good writing in both story line and description. It is as described. Sapphic cozy fantasy romance, and I am HERE for it. But Audible/Audiobook companies, I BEG OF YOU: GET AN ACTUAL HUMAN WITH EMOTIONS to narrate your books!! This book deserves better!

Everything in this was trash. Thank the gods it was free.

I found this free book, thought I would give it a try, but really it was a waste of time.

The narration was stale and boring, and it sometimes just spells the words for you one of the characters in the book have a strange name so the AI just spells it out for you EVERYTIME the character is mentioned. You get really confused as to who is talking because the AI voice is so manaton, and the action is also subdued because of the same problem.

The writing was bad, obviously made by a AI, the first 25% of the book I kind of just wrote it off as maybe the writer just needed a little to get in the swing of things, but after that everything was just a jumbled mess, I'm not even sure how the two MCs got so damn close. They slept together once and then they will die for eachother? Then a few weeks passed and now they are backstabbing but they didnt want to backstab? like how did that all even come about? If you want LGBTQ+ there are so many others that make good books, There are some good websites that show you amazing authors and more than half of them are also on audible. Do yourself a favor and do not even look at this book, or this AI author.