Starlight and Shadows

A Sapphic Cozy Fantasy Romance

By: Vera Winters

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins

Publisher's summary

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!

Great characters

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

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.

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.

Very poorly done, leave the writing to REAL people

I was hoping to mark Pride month this year by reviewing a few books written particularly through a sapphic lense, so searched chose three (more or less at random) from Audible. I've read romantic fantasy before and enjoyed it, but even though I knew genre fiction is generally not as well written as literature, I persisted because I was curious. I finished this book.

Firstly, this is narrated by AI. It is awful. The intonation is all off. I had to keep "interpreting" banter by thinking about what it "should" sound like, and listening to the robotic narration through intimate scenes was almost painful. I couldn't stop giggling through them.

Later, in researching the author I stumbled immediately upon references that the entire book was written with AI. While I chalked it up to the terrible narration at the time, this now makes total sense. There were unpredictable tense changes, some scenes rambled on and on, and the predictable/stereotypical dialogue was a sure clue.

After I came across that unwelcome information and realized I'd plowed through the entire book, thinking it was representative literature, I became angry. There are so few works out there with LGBTQ representation, not to mention sapphic in particular, I felt it was thumbing its nose at the systemic bigotry and misogyny that doubtless prevented writers from publishing such representative literature in the first place.

Leave the writing and narration to REAL people. Your readers deserve it.