SFINCS3 Review: Of All the Stars by Kris Madigan
- Angela Boord
- Mar 30
- 3 min read
“The Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championship (SFINCS, pronounced “sphinx”) is a yearly competition to recognize, honor, and celebrate the talent and creativity present in the indie community. We are a sister competition to both SPFBO and SPSFC, and we highlight greatness in the novella format in all areas of speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, horror, etc.).” – From the official SFINCS website.
We're now in Phase 3 of the SFINCS competition: the finals! There's no more elimination in this phase; the ten books in this phase were chosen out of the original hundred and made it to the end! In Phase 3, they'll all be ranked by score until eventually one book comes out on top.
Note: The following review contains only my personal thoughts as a judge and does not reflect the views of the team as a whole.
The magic that is the heartbeat of Kosma's city is dying. Determined to fix it, she ventures outside the confines of her snow-laden tower to discover what's happening. But when her transportation spell takes her to another city entirely, one where magic is met with suspicion, she's left to rely on the closed-off and fierce Avaline for both her freedom and safe return home.
Together, they make the journey North, learning unexpected truths about themselves along the way.
Review
When we got the list of finalists and figured out which ones our team still needed to read, Of All the Stars was the book that jumped out at me first. It hooked me with the elegant prose of its beginning and the mission it seemed to set for its protagonist. Ultimately, I felt like the novella didn't live up to its beginning, but I also think there's a lot of potential in its pages and may find an audience with vibe readers more than it did for me.
Kosma is a magic user in a northern city where magic is failing and our protagonist seems to be the only one who wants to admit it. Determined to do something about it, she and her little fox companion Nipa (my favorite) set out into the cold, snowy night. The magic seems to have other ideas, though. Inexplicably, Kosma is whisked away to a desert country where magic is viewed with suspicion. She is interrogated and imprisoned, her fate laid completely in the hands of a fierce female military officer named Avaline.
This was the point at which the story began to feel as if it was veering away from the promises made by the beginning. Kosma seems to forget about her original mission, even though her magic isn't working in this southern country, and I felt like surely she would ask a lot of questions to solve the mystery. "Agency" has become a bit of a buzzword these days, and I feel like it is often misused to refer to big action scenes, but I think this story would have benefited from more opportunities for the MC to drive the plot, even in small ways through dialogue, internal motivation, etc.
As a reader I found it a little confusing to switch gears to the enemies-to-lovers sapphic romance that became the primary plot, but I am always up for a romance, so I settled in. But here, too, it felt as if the reader was being asked to assume too many things from the vibes or to at least read a lot into the narrative from a familiarity with romance tropes. Because Kosma is an extremely passive protagonist, the romance began to feel to me uncomfortably like Stockholm syndrome. In addition, when action does happen, it's off page and there isn't much time given to emotionally dealing with it. I think this adds to the feeling of "nothing really happening", though I think Madigan does want us to assume that plenty is happening beneath the surface.
On the positive side, Madigan's prose shines throughout the story; she's clearly a talented writer. I also appreciated the story’s quietness; I think that making this story into an action-based epic fantasy would have been a mistake. Though I wanted more drive from Kosma, I appreciated that she was a “soft” heroine, not a stereotypical strong and snarky one.
So while I do think the story could have benefited from being clarified structurally, giving the sympathetic protagonist (and her fox!) more opportunities to have her own goals, desires, wants, etc. and the ability to act on them, if you like grumpy-sunshine, enemies-to-lovers sapphic romances or quiet character stories based mostly on vibes, I'd encourage you to give this one a shot.
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