The Trope-ification of YA Fantasy and its Marketing: On Alex Aster’s “Lightlark”
Alex Aster | Lightlark | Amulet Books | August 2022 | 416 Pages
It was the release day of a book I had been anticipating for almost a year: Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence by R.F. Kuang. Kuang had already delivered a powerful and complex blend of fantasy and cultural critique in The Poppy War trilogy, and Babel’s premise, to examine the effects of colonization against a dark academia backdrop, suggested a similarly brilliant story. I quickly hunted down two copies—one for my friend and one for myself—happy to find that a display at my local bookstore had been dedicated to its arrival.
As I headed to check-out, another striking black-and-red cover caught my eye, and I paused long enough to take a peek at the inside jacket. What I found gave me a good laugh; it was a list of words that, while technically unique, I had seen many times before: “Lie. Cheat. Betray.” It was embossed in dramatic lettering, followed by, “Even as love complicates everything.” This was another one of those YA fantasy projects; anyone familiar with the genre will know what I mean. For those who aren’t, think of a story that’s roughly five percent plot and ninety-five percent random jumbles of Mary Sue-led, instant-attraction-romance nonsense.
Still cradling my two copies of Babel, I inspected this new book’s cover. A distracting blue sticker informed me it was ten percent off. Paired with my Barnes and Noble membership, I would get thirty percent off. Part of what swayed me was a desire for stupid, fun (with an emphasis on stupid) YA novels that I had never been able to squash. The other part was the fact that each page had thorn detailing on the edges. Vanity designs such as that have me in a chokehold. They catch my eye, make me want to own the book just so I can admire its aesthetic, even if the story’s quality doesn’t match. What can I say; I’m a sucker for pretty books.
I stacked it atop my two copies of the masterpiece that is Babel and bought them all. The book was titled Lightlark.
A few days later, before our weekly D&D session, I handed my friend her copy of Babel. She looked at my stack of “to-read” books and noticed Lightlark sandwiched between lush fantasies such as The Oleander Sword and Daughter of the Moon Goddess. “You bought Lightlark?!”
“Yes?” I replied.
“Haven’t you heard what’s going on with the author?”
Great, I thought to myself. This was not the first time I had unknowingly supported an author who was, at the time, embroiled in controversy. Hopefully, at least, this would not be anything like Emily Duncan, the author whose antisemitic behavior, as well as their harassment of people of color via Twitter, I hadn’t discovered until after purchasing hardcover copies of all three of her novels.
“I don’t know everything, but Alex Aster apparently lied to people about what was in the book,” my friend told me. “Like, she promoted it with scenes that were missing, and lots of reviewers are mad about it.”
“Oh, fun,” I remarked, but I was hardly upset. I had not come across any of the author’s promotional material, so I had no expectations going in. The 2.5-star range the book was sitting in on Goodreads did not scare me away; instead, it felt like a promise of a good time. Perhaps I had fallen victim to the human love for drama. Sometimes I’m not in the mood to question the way I perceive the world. Sometimes I’m in the mood for a cheap and easy thrill. And, of course, I am not immune to the draw of controversy. In just the same way I might pressure my friends for all of the details about drama that I will forget by the end of the day concerning people I don’t know, I wanted to be part of this specific corner of book history.
Picking up Lightlark in the store, I hadn’t been under any impression that it would be a life-changing masterpiece; I’d grabbed it because it sounded a little fun, a little goofy, and a little stupid.
How bad could it be?
•
It was bad.
For those that don’t know, Alex Aster’s Lightlark is about an island that appears every one hundred years to host a game where six rulers fight to break their deadly curses. For those that do know, I apologize for invoking those words.
Lightlark tells the story of Isla Crown—the only ruler that receives a last name, for some reason—who must take part in a “deadly” game that takes place on the island that “appears” (except it doesn’t actually appear, it’s just only accessible every century because of storms, or something). The fauna of the island of Lightlark is never described, because who gives a shit about world-building, right? The only thing that matters about Lightlark can be found early in the book, where the island is described as “a shining, cliffy thing” (to which I annotated, “are you joking”), and the sun above as a “yolky thing.” Possibly the best way to describe the plot is as a series of pointless MacGuffin hunts, carried out with the most nails-on-chalkboard writing I have ever read. In between the seemingly random plot progression—at one point, Isla is temporarily possessed by a ghost that does nothing but attempt to seduce the king—Aster indulges in bland romance scenes and nonsensical competitions. There is no dying in this supposedly deadly game.
Solid writing is for cowards, after all. True commitment to storytelling lies in speedrunning as many tropes as possible.
The Protagonist is Special and Not Like Other Girls: “Isla’s sudden death by drowning might have been the first step to fulfilling the prophecy. But for some reason, the person on the balcony had wanted to keep her alive. Why?”
She Likes “the Guy” Immediately (With No Justification): “Part of her was surprised that she felt so comfortable around a man after only a few days of knowing him. And perhaps that was just what he wanted—for her to let her guard down.”
She Realizes How Special and Different She Is (Even Though She Always Suspected): “A rose with thorns, just like her. It was beautiful. Vicious.”
Representation That Makes Me Wish the Author Hadn’t Bothered: There is no lone quote that can accurately capture this one. Quite simply, what if the only character who is unambiguously gay, as well as unambiguously a person of color, was gay and sad and had no other characterization? What if the only bisexual woman was shoved into the role of Obligatory Mean Girl? And what if each character only got one offhanded mention of being queer?
There Is a Ball Scene: “It was the Lightlark event of the century, a beautiful excuse for a party that was intended to muddle the anxiety and anguish of the Centennial with bubbling drinks, gowns made of gossamer, and a feast that celebrated each of the isles.” The only thing muddled here is the tone of the novel.
The book’s usage (I hesitate to use the term “exploration,” as that would imply that there was complexity or effort behind it) of these tropes does warrant a deeper look. Isla herself is a mess of contradictions. Remember: According to the cover, she is meant to lie, cheat, and betray. It would be great if any of these things actually happened, though. I would love to read a story where the protagonist wasn’t constantly on the receiving end of the lying, cheating, and betraying.
I watched Isla flit through the story, whining to herself about how stupid and useless she is, until the moments where Aster wants her to seem cool. She’s clumsy enough to fall off her room’s balcony, but is skilled enough with a sword to nearly beat the king in a duel (and she only loses because she remembers that she shouldn’t draw attention to herself). She’s young and gorgeous, dressing in a skimpy gown made of leaves or a t-shirt and messy bun combination straight from a Wattpad fanfiction. She is introduced as powerless but is revealed, to no surprise, to be more special and powerful than everyone else.
All-powerful female leads that mask their disproportionate importance behind mock helplessness are not new to the YA genre. Coming across one is no surprise—only a familiar disappointment. Finding out how quirky and different (in a way that makes her special, of course) Isla Crown is felt like returning home. A home that is the metaphorical equivalent of my ant-infested college apartment, but home nonetheless.
The best protagonists are more than the character traits they have been assigned; rather than being limited to their tropes, they change the story as much as the story changes them. Katniss Everdeen is a famous example and, despite all the time that has passed, still my go-to for a well-written protagonist. Her emotions are justified, her moments of strength and weakness are appropriate, and she is not confined to a single trait. To think that the only kind of protagonist young girls may get is an author self-insert designed to be better than everyone (yet is still instilled with a false sense of humility to create the illusion of character flaws) is disheartening. Katniss gives young girls someone who is flawed and powerful to look up to. Isla gives girls an unattainable, inhuman image of flawlessness that they can observe but never touch.
A similarly flat manifestation of tropes can be found in the Dark and Brooding™ love interest. His name is literally “Grim.” No, that is not a joke. We watch these characters mime the flirting-and-bickering combination that characterize many enemies-to-lovers stories, but there is never a moment where we doubt that the two of them will share many “spicy” (as stated by Aster’s marketing) scenes in the future. I must clarify, however, that these are the most tame “spicy scenes” that I have ever read. What’s worse, Grim’s character is just a knockoff of Sarah J. Maas’s Rhysand from her A Court of Thorns and Roses series. Just like his inspiration, Grim is sexy, mysterious, tortured, and violates the protagonist’s boundaries—not that it matters, of course, because he’s sexy.
Did you forget about the sun being described as “a yolky thing”? No? Good, because it turns out that’s a crucial plot point: “‘The yolk . . . is the sun.’ How many times had she thought the full moon looked like an egg? That the sun looked yolky?”
The note I left for this passage was, “Words cannot describe how angry this makes me.” And it’s true—try as I might, I have not managed to find a way to articulate exactly how deeply this plot point, which sees the “heart of the island,” a magical object that is the solution to the curses, as an egg yolk that falls out of the sun (???), bothers me. The one time that Isla realizes something on her own, it happens in the most convenient and contrived solution imaginable. The readers were never given any reason to suspect that the few offhanded sun-yolk metaphors would be a key plotpoint, so the reveal comes out of nowhere. Nothing about this revelation was earned; it simply happened because Aster wanted it to. Forget original writing. If this is the sort of originality that Aster has to offer, then I don’t want it. Stick to ripping off the most popular tropes of popular books.
•
Upon finishing Lightlark, I kept returning to Aster’s refrain: “Lie. Cheat. Betray.” While many synopses aren’t entirely representative of the story, and many others have given me wrong impressions of what I would soon read, I can confidently say that I have never had a book’s synopsis attempt to gaslight me.
A viral TikTok detailing a synopsis for an unpublished book led Alex Aster to landing a six-figure book deal. As if having rich parents—which allowed her to live at home and focus on writing her novel, something you really can’t tell by reading it—wasn’t enough, she had already been published, despite her efforts to don a “struggling writer who just wants to chase her dreams” persona. This book deal, in turn, prompted her to brag incessantly in every video she made that wasn’t a random list of story tropes meant to promote her then-unreleased novel.
As I scrolled through her TikTok profile, having fallen deep into this rabbit hole, it seemed as though every other video of hers repurposed the same set of carefully crafted phrases about how her many years of discouragement had ended in a movie deal with the producers of Twilight. It was as if she had fallen in love with a logline about her publishing career and was determined to plaster it everywhere. Happenings like this fuel the ongoing discussion of what BookTok is doing to the world of publishing, and it would be both disingenuous and cruel to attribute certain failings of the industry to one woman. However, we can look at her and her novel’s specific marketing failures—and believe me, there are plenty.
I can see it clearly: the marketing team thinking they’re promotional geniuses for lifting exact phrases from Aster’s original TikTok to include in the synopsis. Take the aforementioned quote, for example: “To survive, Isla Crown must lie. Cheat. Betray.” It first appeared in white text against a stock photo slideshow background, on a TikTok still proudly pinned to the top of Aster’s profile.
Because Aster’s tag lines, though overused, are effective. As frustrated as the social media users I encountered were, each of them could write Lightlark’s hook from memory: that it is about an island that appears every one hundred years to host a game where six rulers fight to break their deadly curses. Just like the refrain above, this is Aster’s original TikTok verbatim. If readers were attracted to those original phrases, why should the effort to create new, more suitable ones be put in? All that matters to the publisher is that people buy the book, not that they like it.
That, I think, is what is most depressing about Lightlark. It is painfully obvious that the entire team involved was so blinded by the promise of an easy paycheck that they didn’t bother to ensure the novel reflected its marketing. It was not published with the intent to tell and share a story; it was published with the intent to sell.
•
The average Young Adult hardcover novel ranges from eighteen to twenty dollars. Lightlark is listed at a price of $19.99. Federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. At those rates, discounting taxes, Lightlark would cost nearly three hours of one’s life to purchase. With my wage and the thiry percent off I scored with my Barnes and Noble membership and the promotional discount, Lightlark cost roughly 1.2 hours of my life.
I like to support authors. I purchase every book I read because I greatly value literature as a storytelling medium and I want to do all that I can to support its contributors. The more I learn how difficult it is for authors to make it big, let alone survive (Xiran Jay Zhao, the bestselling author of Iron Widow, received only a $16,000 advance per book), the more I have wanted to pour what money I can spare into supporting as many authors as possible. Rarely do I regret purchasing a book; even if it is not one that I enjoy—which, based on my hyper-specific taste not even I fully understand, happens quite often—I can at least be satisfied knowing I supported an author. Lightlark is a truly groundbreaking piece of work because it became one of the few books that I regret spending my money on.
Lightlark is empty. It is cynical. It is by-the-numbers. It feels like a safe, market-tested consumable that a soulless corporation would push out for a quick and easy paycheck; a product first, book second. To think that I supported something like this—to think that I supported a product that spits in the face of everything great about literature—breaks me a little.
I hate that, with my money, I told the publisher that I am willing to accept an unoriginal, box-checking, phoned-in knockoff of a classic YA fantasy story. Because, as readers, we deserve books that value our intelligence. We deserve stories that strive to entertain, to inform, to question, to become something greater than words inked onto mass-produced pages. We deserve uniqueness. We deserve passion. We deserve art.
When I finished reading Lightlark, I set it aside immediately. It has taken up permanent residence in a pile of other forgotten books in an empty room in my hometown, two hours away from me. The beautiful thorn-decorated pages remain smothered in neon-green sticky notes, angrily scribbled annotations flooding the margins.
Babel has been welcomed onto my ever-competitive shelf of favorites, stationed mere inches from the foot of my bed. There it stands, tall and proud, its monochrome cover juxtaposed with the flashier books beside it. It is forever within my reach, for the days when I want to carefully slide it out and admire it again, to slowly flip through pages and graze my fingers along the smooth dust jacket, to feel the book that is weighty beneath the raw brilliance of its story.
I do not hate Lightlark for what it is. I hate it for what it represents.
(That is not entirely the truth—I still hate this book.)