Lucia Fairfax has been living on borrowed fortune, and in Florescentia the loan comes due. I.V. Ophelia's gothic romantasy drops us into Astraea, a bioluminescent city that prays to the stars, where Lucia works as an inventor and occultist who draws luck out of a place she calls the Otherside. Then a ritual fails. Her husband dies. The luck that kept her comfortable starts to drain away, and the ritual she tries next is a mistake only a desperate person makes. What answers her is Altair, a being the stars themselves made, and the question under the whole book is simple and mean: what does it cost to get your luck back, and who gets to set the price?
Altair is the reason to pick this up, and Ophelia knows it. He moves between shadow, monster and human, and when he takes a human shape he borrows the face of Lucia's dead husband, Dorian. Sit with that for a second. It's a seduction with grief built into the architecture, and the book uses the discomfort instead of apologizing for it. He's sarcastic, openly besotted, jealous, hard to read, and every so often cruel. The predator and prey current is where the chemistry lives: feeding, hunger, who holds power in the room, and a bargain the two of them keep renegotiating. The banter is the real surprise. A cosmic being with a taste for sarcasm is funny on the page, and the humor lets the tension bite instead of just loom.
I won't be coy about the heat. The spice holds off until the second half, then arrives with a creative streak. Altair's shape-shifting doesn't stop at his face, and Ophelia follows that logic into anatomy that is strange, deliberate and not shy about it. There's a botanical strain to the eroticism too, which the title hints at, and at least one scene is odd enough that you may circle back to it. The book treats alien sex as something to be curious about as well as aroused by, which gives the love scenes more texture than the usual monster-romance checklist. One flag worth having: it plays with kink and power inside a predator and prey frame, so keep your own eye on consent as you go.
The world carries more weight than you'd expect from a romance. Astraea reads as steampunk and gothic at once, an alternate take on Victorian New York with a celestial faith running through daily life and luck harvested through ritual. Shadow familiars, creatures not everyone can see, take part in that work, and the whole setup feels like a coherent belief system rather than set dressing. The prose is lush and sensory, and when it lands the city seems lit from inside. When it doesn't, it gets in the way. Some readers will find the sentences overdressed, and the story's logic can blur as a result. She prefers atmosphere to explanation, which means you will sometimes be confused on the way to being enchanted. I'd call that a fair trade, but it is a trade.
Lucia herself divides people. She's a brash, brilliant inventor in a man's world, bratty and self-absorbed in ways that make her lively company, and her curiosity drives the plot as much as her desperation does. Where the book wobbles is her grief. It sets the story in motion, yet some readers find it harder to feel than Altair's hunger, and the mourning can read as a launching pad for the main event instead of a weight the characters carry. The loss still gives the dead-husband's-face setup a sting a pure monster romance wouldn't have.
Why you should read
- Monster romance with banter and a sarcastic, jealous hero
- Steampunk gothic settings with a star-worship belief system
- Slow-burning heat that turns inventive in the second half
- Morally gray bargains and predator and prey tension
What to expect
- Ornate, sensory prose that favors atmosphere over explanation
- Spice that arrives in the second half and gets very strange
- Shapeshifting hero who wears a dead husband's face
- Ends on a cliffhanger with book two still to come
Once Lucia crosses into Altair's realm, the book tightens. She learns what the Otherside actually is, what her own abilities mean, and how deep his appetite runs, and each answer makes leaving a little less possible. At 319 pages it is the first half of a duet, and it stops on a cliffhanger that leaves the central bargain unsettled. The invoice has been sent. By the last page nobody has paid it, and I'm curious who flinches first.
