It was so obvious that this person was tricking her! I couldn't stand it! I do think that's kind of the point, because although a lot of time has passed in the human world, Maya is still a young girl, and young girls make mistakes. As I was listening to events unraveling, I couldn't believe who she was listening to. I will say that towards the middle of the book, is when the story lost me a little bit. So if you are reading this book and are feeling the same way, I say you try to move forward before giving up on this one. It was just really heartbreaking to read, but I knew that something was going to happen for her to escape this life, so I pressed on. The beginning of the novel was really hard to read because of how she was treated. Wives get the sweating sickness? It's Maya's fault. Woman die in childbirth? It's Maya's fault. The people in her life are incredibly cruel and essentially use her as a scapegoat for everything. Maya's story is an interesting one, she is pretty much shunned in her culture just because of a horoscope saying she would be entangled with death. I also like that I could hear the proper pronunciation of everything in this book by doing the audio, where if I read it myself I think I would constantly be second-guessing everything.

I think I might have gotten some of this if I just read the text, but Ayyar's narration just really opened up this world to me.

It really made me understand the culture of the world Maya lived it, and get a feel for a world unlike my own. I really enjoyed Priya Ayyar's narration, and I felt like all the different accents she does for the other characters felt so authentic. I was super excited to hear a women of color narrating the story for another woman of color. I feel that what really made this story come alive for me was the narration. I saw that another reader asked the author on GoodReads what stories this is based on, and she pulled out a ton of different Hindu Myth stories that I have never heard of but now I want to widen my reading experiences and read at some point. I love a good mythology story, and The Star-Touched Queen reads so well as a mythology/folklore story.

The star touched queen book 3