She has sexy dreams about him, then can’t look him in the eye the next day. But from the beginning Grim is soft on Isla. If anyone is immediately seen as a villain, it’s him.

There is only one stronger, the ruler of the Night Shade realm. The king is one of the strongest rulers in terms of actual power. But, they reach an understanding about each other and sort of trust the relationship.

He’s a paranoid guy, not particularly warm and friendly. During the course of the competition, Isla is paired with the King of Lightlark. They pledged allegiance to each other and concocted a separate plan to win the competition and set everyone free. Isla and Celeste (she’s the ruler who is cursed with an early death) have been secretly meeting ahead of the Centennial. Which seems fitting! As if that isn’t bad enough, the actual worst curse is the one that causes every person in one of the realms to die at age 25. The main female character, Isla Crown, has a curse that punishes those who fall in love and her people can only eat hearts. Some can’t go out at day, some can’t go out at night. Each realm has a weakness that was caused by the original curse. I’ll spill the tea in a minute, but first my review.Įvery 100 years the island of Lightlark invites six leaders from the six different cursed realms to compete against each other to break the original curse that resulted in the six individual curses. To win, one condition is that a ruler must die. I did hear about the book from BookTok and was super intrigued. When I first started listening to Lightlark by Alex Aster, I had no idea of the controversy around the book, the author and TikTok.

Lightlark book 2