Putting Anthony Palmini and Vanessa Moyen on an adult romantasy trials book is practically a casting cheat code. Starside—an instant #1 New York Times bestseller and Avon’s twenty-hour-and-two-minute audio showcase—marks Alex Aster’s leap into adult romantasy, and hearing Moyen and Palmini square off in duet narration makes the entire realm feel ten times more dangerous.
Here is the setup: centuries ago, a war split the world into Starside—a paradise where immortal descendants of the gods hoard magic—and Stormside, where mortals scrap for survival. Every fifty years, the King holds the Culling to select fifty challengers allowed through the gates to reach a wish-granting pool of magic. Orphaned blacksmith’s apprentice Aris doesn’t care about wealth or healing: a goddess burned her village and murdered her family when she was a child, and Aris is entering Starside to kill the gods. Once she claims a legendary magic-wielding sword, she becomes target number one—and her only shot at surviving the monsters rising from the ground at night is Harlan Raker, the ruthless king’s guard who betrayed her years ago.
Vanessa Moyen’s Fury Meets Anthony Palmini’s Edge
The duet transitions between Moyen and Palmini are butter-smooth. Moyen voices Aris with this barely contained, jaw-clenched fury that never turns whiny, letting tiny cracks of grief and reluctant vulnerability slip through when the betrayal backstory begins to surface piece by piece. And Palmini—who already owns romantasy listeners’ collective attention after Quicksilver—gives Harlan Raker a low, unsettling edge in the early chapters that makes you feel the history between them before a single flashback even drops.
There is a mid-book nighttime sequence set deep inside the creature-infested interior of Starside where their vocal interplay turns a quiet survival standoff into the most nerve-shredding chapter of the book.
Leveling Up from Lightlark (And Why 1.75x Is the Move)
If you listened to Lightlark and wished the stakes were darker and the tension hit harder, this adult debut is a massive level-up. My one honest pacing note: across the 1,202-minute runtime, there is a slower stretch in the middle as the challengers cross Starside. Dialing playback to 1.75x keeps that middle trek moving briskly without clipping the dialogue—and when you hit the final thirty pages, you will be counting the days until Book 2.
