Rites of the Starling

In a world of five fractured kingdoms, a princess finds herself alone — separated from the man she loves, hunted by creatures she doesn't fully understand, and responsible for a child who depends on her for survival. Rites of the Starling picks up where its predecessor left off, but the stakes have sharpened: a cataclysmic migration is approaching, and the quest to uncover the truth about her family pulls her deeper into a cursed realm where every ally is uncertain and every choice carries weight. At its core, this is a story about what it costs to become the person a crisis demands you be.

Devney Perry writes romantasy with a particular emotional precision — the romance never eclipses the larger world-building, and the danger feels genuinely dangerous. The pacing is relentless in the best way: short chapters that pull you forward, tension that rarely releases cleanly, and a narrative voice that keeps the internal stakes as vivid as the external ones. Readers who have followed this series will find the second installment more confident in its mythology, more willing to complicate its characters, and more satisfying in the moments it chooses to slow down.