ARC Review of Across Time and Starlight

Magical, immersive, and riveting.

With mythical origin stories, prophesied time travelers, missing dreams, and magical beings, this high fantasy is a thrilling ride that instantly makes the reader root for Saya and Andreas. 

I was immediately hooked by the opening, which drew me in with both the writing style and direct introduction to the premise of the story: 

“There was only one thing I remembered about the boy I loved. He didn’t believe I existed. Perhaps that was only natural, since we met in a dream. Mine or his, or the World Trees’, who dreamed our lives into existence, that I never truly figured out.” 

From here, Alessandro Candotti's writing only becomes more immersive and almost poetic, appealing to the senses with its vivid depiction of drifting through the skies and falling to black seas and waiting nets. The reader is thrust first into a dream, clearly laid out as such, and afterward informed that not all dream, and those that do are doomed to have theirs devoured by the Black Tree, or in the case of Saya, doomed to see every dream become reality. 

The story first follows Saya, who is not free and has a secret of her own.  Saya has a deep and tragic backstory, one I would have liked to see spread out more evenly throughout the book. We get much of her backstory right out of the gate in chapter one in the form of memories. While intriguing, troubling, and effective at making the reader sympathetic, it does detract from the story at hand and what she’s currently doing in the priestess temple. I think it could have been shortened here and sprinkled in later. The reader is given a slew of new terms and backstory for the different lands, Saya’s land in particular, and it’s a lot to take in for chapter one. 

The story features dual perspectives from Saya and Andreas, as well as a rich narrative involving the past and present, looping it all together in a tapestry of in-the-moment action, immersive flashbacks, and intriguing philosophical arguments to support the theme of fated destiny vs. choice.  

In the old time, we are introduced to Melasquez, a beggar who discovers a black World Tree, using it to rip open a rift across planes. When the rift closes, and the elders forbid its reopening, the dream connection between worlds is lost, and Andreas is desperate to bring it back to find the girl of his dreams. 

The threat of annihilation looms over their heads as soldiers from the neighboring lands threaten their very existence. In the New Time, we learn how this story plays out, and in exchange for safety, the people must give their dreams to the black World Tree to power their floating land. Though there’s a steep price for parting with your dreams.  

Imaginative, hard to put down, and nail-biting. This story engages the reader until the end. As a fair warning, this novel is perhaps not for those who demand clean, wrapped-up endings, as it leaves the reader with some food for thought but not necessarily a happily ever after. 

Explicit content warnings: Infrequent but fairly explicit for the spice level. Fairly clean language (one instance of “arse” and some book-invented phrases). Some violence with gory imagery. I wasn’t a fan of one of Saya’s dreams in which she clearly tells the man in the dream “no,” but he continues to make sexual advances anyway. This can possibly be considered a gray area since it is her dream and may represent fear of intimacy, but it will likely turn some readers off. 

Across Time and Starlight Book Blurb:

“I’ll find you, in this world or any other.”

Enter a world where time travelers are destined to love faeries—a tale of forbidden magic, prophecy, and empire.

A dream-eating World Tree feeds upon the people of the Floating City, slowly devouring their souls. As a religious resistance builds against the Tree and its tyrannical inquisitors, the city is filled with prophecies of a time traveler who will return their stolen dreams.

The Tree dispatches the slave Saya, a shape-shifting faerie whose wings were stolen from her, to locate the time walker. When she confronts him, Saya can’t shake the feeling that this untamed traveler named Andreas is the same boy who once gifted her wings in a dream. The two forge an unlikely alliance to save the city, each suspicious of the other’s motives even while they hide their growing feelings for each other.

As a civil war ignites, they must use cursed magic to journey through the uprising, across time and parallel worlds to bring down the malignant Tree. Can they rescue the souls of their people and their lost dreams of each other?

This is a story about hope and healing for everyone who believes the wounds in your heart are how the light gets in.

About the author, Alessandro Candotti:

Ever since I came to know myself, writing has been in my blood. A living force. A pulse that quickens, an inner heat that warms the heart. Or a pain, that never stops wringing out the next breathing word.

Writing for me is a beating reason for being. I am its grateful servant. It is my honor to share the joy of creation with others. Born in South Africa, I write poetry and novels out of Dubai in the UAE. 

Review by Janine Eaby

Janine Eaby loves to read, write, and garden. She is the author of the Beyond the Water's Edge fantasy book series and enjoys experimenting with poetry.