52 pages • 1 hour read
Alex AsterLightlark
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Dangerous Allure of Beauty
In the world of Lightlark, beauty is dangerous. The novel’s descriptions of Isla and the Wildling people model this attitude. The Wildlings are preternaturally beautiful, but their beauty is used to lure victims whose hearts they will eat. This earns their entire realm hatred, a reputation that Isla has to contend with in her performance at the Centennial. People from other realms believe that Isla is “a temptress. A monster who subsist[s] on the hearts of easily seduced prey” (68). For the first half of the novel, she plays into that assumption by wearing gorgeous, revealing gowns as “armor,” thinking that if people misjudge her, she can avoid their noticing what she’s really doing. In this way, Isla’s beauty is a weapon, but employed differently than the other rulers suspect and her guardians intend.
Isla, in turn, puts herself at risk through her own attraction to the beauty of others. When she meets Grim, she is suspicious of his extraordinary good looks. His hair is “ink across a page” and his eyes “so dark they seem[] endless” (36), and the first time they touch, she feels a “chill that lick[s] her spine like night blossoming in her bones” (102). Similarly, Isla notices Oro’s bare body, “muscled like a warrior, toned as sharply as a blade” (328), and feels electricity when he touches her. Isla does not trust these feelings, realizing that they may lead her to act against her own best interest. She tries to ignore them or explain them away, even accusing Grim of using his magical powers of seduction to send her sexual dreams about him.
Although Isla knows what it’s like to have people fear and mistrust her because of her beauty, she shares the same prejudice—and with good reason. In one scene, Isla is attacked by a gorgeous rosebush that stabs her with needle-like barbs and spikes, causing her the greatest physical pain she experiences in the novel. Her attraction to Grim harms her, too; shortly after she gives into his seduction, he reveals his months-long manipulation and betrayal of her. It seems that Terra, Isla’s guardian, may be right when she warns Isla against following her emotions (231).
In the end, Isla realizes that the bonds she can trust run deeper than superficial attraction. Though neither Isla nor Oro have lost their fantasy-hero good looks, they have seen each other in their worst and weakest moments and come to know each other as flawed but trustworthy. Their love is not based on beauty alone but on mutual trust and connection.
Power and Duty
Each of the novel’s central characters is the hereditary ruler of a kingdom or realm. This status confers significant power, but not necessarily freedom, as the ruler is expected to place the good of the realm above any merely personal desires. When her guardians train Isla for her role in the Centennial, they make sure she knows that her primary motivation needs to be the well-being of the realm of Wildling: “Her body did not belong solely to her, Poppy said. It belonged to the realm. She was its representative, its lifeline” (70). This expectation of unlimited loyalty to one’s realm seems to be shared by all the rulers. The phrasing of Cleo’s ice trial underscores this: “For worse than desiring something above the good of one’s realm is not being sure of what you want at all” (124). Cleo’s rule assumes that desire outside of the realm is bad; furthermore, Cleo only advocates for the awareness of other desires, not for pursuit of them. This expectation makes it difficult for Isla to justify pursuing her non-Wildling desires even when she does become aware of them.
A ruler’s unrivaled loyalty to their realm is more than just a cultural expectation, however. Each of the rulers of Lightlark has an energetic connection to their land and their people. Wildling was created from the blood and bones of previous Wildling rulers (163), and it suffers when Isla is away. Isla feels her own connection to Lightlark, the ancient homeland of the Wildlings, when she steps onto the island for the first time: “One of the original sources of power, its ground still thrummed with it, singing to Isla in a humming siren song” (13). The consequence of this bond between ruler and land means that if any of them dies without an heir, their entire land will die, too. When the island of Lightlark itself begins to suffer odd cold snaps and devastating earthquakes, Oro reveals that “his golden skin had started to gray” (151). He has a wasting disease and is dying.
At the end of the novel, Celeste has died without an heir, and the fate of Starling is unclear. But Isla plans to return to Wildling. While she has come to terms with her new desires and motivations, her love of her people and her physical connection to the land mean that her presence is needed to heal the land and help the people prosper, and she chooses to fulfill this duty before pursuing her personal dreams. The novel’s message here is nuanced: Isla must find a balance between honoring the land and following her heart.
Abandonment and Betrayal
In a later scene in the novel, an oracle tells Isla that “there are lies and liars all around [her]” (275). While Isla isn’t sure what this means, her history has taught her that she can only rely on herself. A recurrent memory for Isla is of training with her guardians, who abandoned her in a storm in the woods and made her hang from a tree branch for five hours. “Fall and you’ll break your legs” (58), they cautioned her. This abandonment made Isla physically strong and taught her to ignore her emotions and never display vulnerability. Her caretakers believed these traits would be crucial for her survival, and given the way things play out, they may have been right to think so. Nonetheless, Isla’s inability to be vulnerable or to trust others does tremendous damage to her emotional development.
The wounds of abandonment are everywhere on Lightlark, and they all point back to Wildlings. The woods are filled with ancient creatures who would kill Isla merely because they hold a grudge against the Wildling people for abandoning the island after the curses were cast. Wild Isle itself is a lifeless wreck, full of dead trees described as “skeletons swaying in the wind” (207). The Vinderlanders, the remnants of the Wildling people left behind after the exodus, have turned to cannibalism, a symbol of self-destruction.
Her traumatic upbringing and gloomy heritage teach Isla that the world is a treacherous place, and she tends to find enemies and schemes everywhere she looks, suspecting Cleo, Azul, and even, at one point, her maid, Ella, of working against her. Isla finally learns to let her guard down through the constant support of her friend and “sister” Celeste. When she finds an ally in Grim, she learns to trust a little more. Near the end of the novel, Isla is sure she has found a way to save all three of them from the curses, an act that will propel her toward the future of her dreams: friendship, adventure, and love. Unfortunately, the oracle’s words prove true, and Isla experiences a devastating betrayal when she discovers that her best friend, her lover, and her guardians have been working for years to manipulate her. After Celeste’s death, Isla is broken.
The novel ends on a note of cautious optimism, with Isla and Oro together. They have acknowledged their love and trust in each other, yet Isla wants to be careful, not to “[rush] in without thinking, without waiting” (407). They begin to build toward a future by going back to the Place of Mirrors in the abandoned Wild Isle and opening the mysterious spiral door, a symbol of hope for Isla after a lifetime of betrayal.
