Books like Of the Stars by A.M. Alcedo

You must choose: Forsake your darkness or fight for it? Norah is a nearly thirty burned-out mental health therapist at Corvid’s Hospital. She holds space for others while her own wounds are locked within the spare bedroom of her bequeathed Gothic home. Uncanny happenstance introduces her to her newest friend and colleague, Dexteras Doe, a gentle, solitary old man. Following a traumatic tragedy decades prior, Dex was left with amnesia, mental illness, and a sense of “fading” from existence. Norah is fascinated by the elder’s otherworldliness while Dex is enamored by the therapist’s resiliency and untold past. Their friendship and very lives are threatened when they are beckoned to an impossible, underground fight club that promises irresistible prizes in exchange for spilled blood. Hungry for answers about their pasts and about the dark, alluring beings that lurk in the realm’s crimson neon, they step into the ring. As their most hideous selves are exposed, it begs the question: is their connection destined by the alignment of much darker stars? Of the Stars by A.M. Alcledo is an adult contemporary fantasy with a literary bend about the found-families that teach us to fall in love with healing ourselves, and the found-families best unfounded. It’s for the tired and self aware readers who go to therapy and heal themselves because the generations before them did not. New and established adult audiences will find a home in a father-daughteresque duo, and neurodiverse characters learning to overcome their complex inter-generational curses and create their identities from scratch.

First publish date: 2023