Snow falls soft on frozen hearts,
Two souls bound by ancient arts,
The Sun above, the magic deep,
Love awakens from its sleep.
Rachel Griffin returns with her most ambitious work yet in The Sun and the Starmaker by Rachel Griffin, a sweeping romantic fantasy that asks how far we’ll go to save the people we love—and what we’ll become in the process. Tucked in the snow-covered peaks of the Lost Range, where sunlight cannot reach without magic, this story weaves fairy tale enchantment with raw emotional truth in ways that both captivate and challenge readers.
When Magic Demands Everything
Aurora Finch’s life shatters in a single frozen morning. Three days before her wedding to Farren, she encounters the mysterious Starmaker in the woods—and everything changes. He senses powerful magic within her, the same solar magic that keeps her village of Reverie alive. Aurora faces an impossible choice: abandon her carefully planned life to become the Starmaker Rising, or watch her sister Elsie succumb to the deadly Frost creeping through their mountain home.
Griffin excels at crafting these impossible moments. Aurora’s negotiation with the Starmaker—demanding he heal Elsie and that they marry to preserve her reputation—reveals a protagonist who refuses to be passive even when circumstances strip away her agency. This marriage-of-convenience framework launches The Sun and the Starmaker by Rachel Griffin into classic enemies-to-lovers territory, but Griffin subverts expectations at every turn.
The world-building deserves particular praise. Reverie exists beyond the Sun’s natural reach, sustained only through the Starmaker’s daily ritual of pulling light over the mountain peaks. Griffin layers in details about glare lines (magical connections between homes formed through relationships), candy stripe phlox that indicate the Frost’s advancement, and snow deer with crystalline fur. The magic system feels both whimsical and grounded, operating on personal connection rather than rigid spell-casting rules. The Sun herself becomes a character—divine yet deeply flawed, capable of both immense love and devastating forgetfulness.
The Heart of Winter
Where The Sun and the Starmaker by Rachel Griffin truly shines is in its emotional landscape. Aurora arrives at the ice-covered castle expecting cold isolation, and initially that’s exactly what she finds. Caspian, the current Starmaker, proves distant and dismissive, telling her plainly that comforting her isn’t his job. Their early confrontations crackle with tension—Aurora mourning her lost life, Caspian impatient with her inability to move forward.
But Griffin peels back layers with remarkable patience. Caspian’s childhood bedroom, preserved in the castle, holds journals and photographs revealing the boy he once was before immortality consumed his humanity. Aurora discovers his favorite roses, his love of poetry, the family he lost centuries ago. Tilly, the living snow angel forever searching for her human form, becomes a mirror for both characters’ struggles with identity and belonging.
The romance develops through these small revelations. A conversation about Caspian’s mentor. Teaching sessions on the glacier. Shared meals where walls slowly crumble. Griffin understands that true intimacy grows not from grand gestures but from witnessing someone’s vulnerability and choosing to stay anyway. When Aurora and Caspian finally admit their feelings, the weight of Caspian’s impending death—his magic transferring to Aurora means his own end—transforms their love story into something achingly bittersweet.
Shadows in Paradise
Despite its considerable strengths, the novel stumbles in pacing during its middle act. Once Caspian and Aurora acknowledge their attraction, the progression toward his death feels simultaneously rushed and drawn out. Certain revelations about the Sun’s forgotten love and the possibility of sharing immortality arrive late enough that earlier tension dissipates. Readers may find themselves wishing Griffin had seeded these possibilities sooner or compressed the romantic development to allow more space for the metaphysical questions at the novel’s heart.
The supporting cast, while charming, occasionally feels underutilized. Aurora’s family—particularly her brother Aspen and sister Elsie—provide crucial emotional grounding in early chapters but fade somewhat after Aurora moves to the castle. Farren, Aurora’s original fiancé, deserves more than the handful of scenes he receives, given his significance to Aurora’s sacrifice. Only Tilly, the snow angel, maintains a consistent presence that feels fully realized.
Griffin’s prose sometimes tips toward overwrought, particularly during emotional peaks. Phrases like “her heart screamed” or “tears burned in her eyes” appear with enough frequency to occasionally pull readers from the moment. The novel’s strength lies in its quieter observations—Aurora noticing how Caspian’s hair shimmers with starlight, or the way roses impossibly bloom around the glacier lamppost—not in its declarations of feeling.
Love Beyond Death
The novel’s final act delivers both heartbreak and hope. Caspian’s death scene, Aurora cradling him as his final magic transfers to her, ranks among the most devastating in recent YA fantasy. But Griffin doesn’t end there. Aurora’s subsequent refusal to accept loss, her desperate research into splitting immortality, and her ultimate success in reminding the Sun of her own forgotten love story transform grief into agency.
This resolution—the Sun agreeing to divide Aurora’s immortality with Caspian, allowing him to return—may feel too convenient for some readers. Yet Griffin earns it through careful thematic groundwork. Aurora spent the entire novel learning that stories matter, that remembering is an act of preservation, that love itself is a form of magic. Her triumph comes not through discovering some hidden loophole but through insisting that the divine remember why Reverie exists at all: because the Sun once loved so deeply she couldn’t bear to let her Starmaker’s village die.
The Sun and the Starmaker by Rachel Griffin joins the author’s previous works—The Nature of Witches, Wild Is the Witch, and Bring Me Your Midnight—in exploring how individuals navigate systems of magic and power while maintaining their humanity. Like those earlier novels, this one asks what we’re willing to sacrifice for love and whether we can forge our own paths within traditions that seem immovable.
The Author’s Own Journey
Griffin’s author’s note reveals she wrote this book while recovering from a traumatic brain injury, composing it through daily persistent pain and uncertainty about whether she’d write again. This context adds profound resonance to Tilly’s storyline—the snow angel searching for herself, needing to see her reflection to remember who she is. Aurora giving Tilly a looking glass, telling her she’s exactly as she should be, becomes Griffin’s gift to herself during a season of profound disconnection from her own identity.
A Starmaker’s Legacy
The Sun and the Starmaker by Rachel Griffin succeeds as a lush, romantic fantasy that earns its emotional peaks through careful character development and world-building. While pacing issues and occasional prose indulgences keep it from perfection, the novel’s central love story—and its insistence that no one should lose themselves to duty—resonates powerfully. Griffin writes with conviction about grief, identity, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we’re allowed to be.
For readers who loved A Curse So Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer, House of Salt and Sorrows by Erin A. Craig, or The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab, this offers similar fairy tale atmosphere with heightened emotional stakes. Those seeking cozy fantasy with sharper edges, where magic systems have real consequences and love requires actual sacrifice, will find much to cherish here.
Aurora Finch begins the novel as someone determined to keep her life small and safe. She ends it having rewritten the rules of immortality itself. That transformation—from reluctant Starmaker to someone who defies death and demands the divine remember its own capacity for love—makes this a journey worth taking, even with its stumbles along the way.