Tor: Engrossing, horrifying, and vivid, Kerstin Hall’s debut novel Star Eater is a hard one to talk about. This is in part simply because there’s so much there there—so much inventive worldbuilding, so much carefully structured power, so many things I want to exclaim over.
Star Eater is a magical consideration of what it means to destroy a power structure. It’s an intimate, gripping exploration of what people are willing to do to maintain the systems that they believe maintain the world; it’s also a story that asks what doors might be opened if we could truly envision a world unlike the one we live in now.. Hall mixes her unique worldbuilding with familiar tropes—the chosen one, the love triangle(ish), the conspiracy, the mentor figures, the loss of a mother—and the combination creates a book that feels both familiar and unnervingly strange.