Remember when I read The Star-Touched Queen and I enjoyed everything except the plot? Welp, A Crown of Wishes resolved that issue, and in the end, I straight-up loved it.

The book both wrapped up nicely, yet still left me wanting more. Much, much more. Soap opera, style, maybe, because reality TV has nothing on Gauri and Vikram, okay? I would watch the crap out of that.

A Crown of Wishes is chock full of magic, fantasy, plot, and plenty of moments that made me fall head-over-heels in love with these characters.

So obviously, there was plenty of wittiness, sarcasm, and stabbiness. But, I mean, who doesn’t love that?

❧ Same old lyrical writing—minus a lot of the cheesy over-the-top moments.

One of my big complaints with The Star-Touched Queen was how easy it was to get bogged down in the writing. Gorgeous, yes. Descriptive, yes. But also cheesy at times. Don’t get me wrong, I love a little cheese here and there, especially in romance, but in relatively small doses.

There are still some cheesy moments in A Crown of Wishes, so if that’s your jam, fret not! They felt better spaced, though, and when one popped up, I found myself going with it rather than rolling my eyes. You know, which is usually not the reaction you want.

As opposed to the first book, though, the cheese here tends to be a bit, well, nutty. Probably because the characters are so much more … colorful, shall we say? So might I recommend a nice Pinot Noire to go with your cheese?

❧ Worried that you’ll miss all the wit and brilliance that was Kamala, the flesh-eating zombie horse? Well, A Crown of Wishes has an actual zombie (okay, a vetala, but close enough), and his sarcasm is delicious.

The only real complaint I have about his character is that his part is all too short-lived. Kamala played a much bigger role in The Star-Touched Queen. I was hoping the vetala would do the same, but sadly, it wasn’t to be. Sometimes, you’ve just got to enjoy your blessings while you’ve got them, however long that may be.

❧ I’m a really big fan of the hate-to-love trope, particularly how it’s handled in this book.

It’s not so much hate-to-love as hate to begrudging truce, to mild annoyance, to deciding maybe it’s worth not killing this one,
to playful bickering, to deciding no one else is allowed to kill them either, to eventually love. You know, like a proper love story. Pretty sure that’s how they’re supposed to go.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again … I’m a real sucker for relationships where two strong individuals get together as one unstoppable force. They don’t need each other, because they’re perfectly fine as individual people, yet they choose each other. There’s something irrisistibly romantic to me about that notion.

Gauri and Vikram more than deliver in that aspect. Alone, they’re both fantastic characters. Together, oh my goodness, I just couldn’t get enough of them. Pretty sure they’re relationship goals. And their banter? *swoons*

❧ The setting feels so much more vivid and in-depth in this book. The mythical creatures really come to life and have actual substance, rather than being something we see in passing.

This is probably what endeared me most to this book. The Star-Touched Queen was great, but it revolved solely around humans, and the fantastical elements were sort of glossed over. In A Crown of Wishes, everything is fantastical. It’s not even set in the real world for most of it, and we even get a chance to meet gods. And they’re every bit as snarky and tricksy as one would hope.

❧ This feels so much like a second book. The Star-Touched Queen was good, but with a lot of pitfalls that made me really question how much I liked it. But A Crown of Thorns? So much more solid and thoroughly enjoyable to the end.

The plot really lost me in The Star-Touched Queen, and I considered DNFing it multiple times. In the second half, even the characters lost me (but I couldn’t give up because what would life be without reading more of Kamala?).

I didn’t have that problem with A Crown of Wishes. Chokshi delivered a wonderful book that felt much more polished than her first one, and I enjoyed every bit of it.

❧ If you’ve read The Star-Touched Queen, you basically already know how this book ends, which sort of takes the steam out of any sort of stakes or tension in this book.

The stakes in this book, versus the previous one, felt much more real and tangible … if I didn’t already know the ending to Vikram’s story, of course. So any time some big stakes came up, I felt sort of like … psssh, he’ll be fine. I felt like that ruined the grandiosity of the plot, which would have been much more effective if we had no idea what would become of Vikram.

If you’ve read them both, did you prefer A Star-Touched Queen or A Crown of Wishes? Are you Team Vikram or Team Amar?