Since the beginning of the phenomenon readers now know as the Lightlark series, Alex Aster has understood how her story ends. But the question of when that ending should arrive—and how her audience might react when it does—has weighed on the author while her platform balloons, her books ride a surge of social media buzz, and her film adaptation with Universal inches toward actualization. This month, the third book in her fantasy saga, Skyshade, will hit shelves, and Aster (who uses a pen name) has joined our Zoom interview from her home in New York City to let me in on more than one secret.
First? The saga of Isla Crown is not yet finished. She can “exclusively share, for the first time ever,” she says, that Skyshade will not conclude the Lightlark series. A fourth book is already on its way.
Second, she’s indeed sitting on “really big news” about the Lightlark film—but those details will have to wait for 2025.
And finally, she admits she’s “afraid.” Not of ending her story, but of the reality that necessarily comes with ending. “I am the only one who knows what’s going to happen” in the next book, Aster tells me. “I always want my readers to be happy, and I always want to bring them joy with each book. But with books like this, with the stakes so high and with a prophecy like the one in this book, ultimately there are going to be endings that not everyone’s going to love. And so I am afraid of that.”
Any Lightlark reader knows the foreshadowing to which Aster alludes: At some point, the Wildling heroine Isla Crown must choose. Love or death? Grim or Oro? Aster’s adventure is built on a dizzying combination of what fans (and critics) would refer to as fantasy tropes: powers and portals, curses and animal companions, festivals and balls, stolen memories and (not infrequent) stabbings, locked vaults and secret libraries, “starsticks” and “dreks” and “flairs” and one hell of a love triangle. It is exactly that promise on which Aster sold her first book, after she turned to TikTok in a bout of frustration: No one, it seemed, wanted to publish the book Aster couldn’t bear to abandon.
But when her casual pitch for the series went viral on TikTok in 2021, Lightlark became a vehicle the 29-year-old Colombian American author herself could hardly control. “Would you read a book about a cursed island that only appears once every hundred years to host a game that gives the six rulers of [each] realm a chance to break their curses?” she asked anyone who might be scrolling online. The answer was—and continues to be—a resounding yes. A six-figure two-book deal and accompanying movie deal followed as Aster’s video (and its already committed audience) caught the attention of publishers. When Lightlark hit shelves in 2022, it sold more than 24,000 copies in its first week on sale, hurling it up the New York Times bestseller list; in the years since, that number has surpassed a million copies. A sequel, Nightbane, landed in 2023, and now Skyshade intends to keep Isla Crown at the center of BookTok chatter and beyond.
Not everyone is pleased with that outcome. Since Lightlark first broke out, Aster has faced a wide range of criticisms and claims, some well-intentioned, others outright false: that she wrote a “clickbait novel,” or didn’t deliver on all her promises about her books, or that she’s an “industry plant,” which is untrue (and rather ludicrous). She’s been accused of “bragging” about her success, or failing to fully acknowledge her financial privilege, including the fact that her sister, Daniella Pierson, is a co-founder of Selena Gomez’s Wondermind. (Aster has addressed this fact in interviews and on her social platforms.) But when I ask Aster how she approaches such response—false, fair, or otherwise—she tells me it doesn’t “play as big of a role as I would’ve thought it would.” Instead, she reserves her attention and care for the readers who are already invested in her work, who comment on Aster’s social platforms discussing “what they like and they don’t like and what they want to happen and don’t want to happen.” Those are the people Aster doesn’t want to disappoint.
She’s struggled to navigate this new reality, in which she can reach readers with a flick of her thumb but increasingly feels the need to stay glued to her desk. She says she works seven days a week, either writing or creating content for social. “I used to respond to every single message, every single comment I got,” she says, “and I said I would do it forever. But then my eyesight started worsening, and my wrist started to hurt...My entire ethos has been, if these people are taking the time to write me a message, the least I can do is respond. And that’s how I still feel. But it reaches a point where it’s like, Okay, I either respond to the messages or I write the books.”
But Aster says she won’t complain about such an enviable position. She loves this work. Multiple times throughout our conversation, she emphasizes her gratefulness, her awareness that what she’s done is rare. As she’s similarly repeated in other interviews, she started trying to publish her work at the age of 12, only to experience a (predictable) deluge of rejections. “I thought I was going to write my book, send an email, and surprise everyone by having my book in bookstores a week from that date,” she says, laughing. She even thought she could write and publish completely anonymously as a 12-year-old, which later inspired her to adopt the pen name Alex Aster while she was in college at the University of Pennsylvania. (She landed on “Aster” thanks to her life-long love of stars.) As a younger writer, “I never cared about people knowing it was me” doing the writing, she says, “which is interesting now because, obviously, I post a lot about my books.” Today, her name, her image, her brand—they’re all inseparable from Lightlark itself. Her 438,000 Instagram followers and 1.3 million TikTok followers understand them as one and the same.
She has also grown with her books—and with her protagonist. Skyshade, in Aster’s estimation, marks a notable departure in Isla Crown’s tendency toward reaction rather than agency. “She’s obviously been caught in this love triangle, and caught between her past and her present and her future and the prophecies,” Aster says. “[Skyshade] is the first time where she truly takes control of her fate and says, ‘Fate should fear me. I am going to happen to the world.’” And Aster knows exactly the direction in which Isla is headed: “I knew how the series was going to end before Lightlark had been published.” Just rest assured that ending won’t take place in Skyshade.
As for the Lightlark film, Aster confirms “there is really big news.” She continues, “I am hopeful that I get to share it soon, but I have heard parts of a script. There are people attached and involved that no one knows about, that I’m really excited about.” That tiny tease is all she’s able to share for now, but—at a time when other high-profile fantasy adaptations are lingering in dreaded development limbo—Universal’s Lightlark confirming any momentum should be interpreted as a victory.
In the interim, Aster isn’t demonstrating any desire to back away from her word processor. In March, her adult debut romance novel, Summer in the City, arrives from William Morrow and Company, and she’s hopeful readers will embrace the genre switch-up as eagerly as they’ve devoured the Lightlark saga. “I’m really excited for readers to see my own voice in first person and see more of what my own thoughts feel like, because obviously I do not live in a fantasy world where an island appears and you have to kill the love of your life,” she says. Contemporary romance “is a genre I love to read, and I hope that readers of the Lightlark series will see that it’s still the same person who loves all those elements in fantasy, translating it into a rom-com.”
Nor does she have any plans to abandon BookTok—or any of the other platforms that revealed to Aster a modern way of navigating the publishing industry. “I think that this is the closest we will get to readers being able to control what is published,” she says. “That was not the case for a really long time.” The internet moves at an increasingly breakneck pace, yes. Some trends barely register as radar blips, and she doubts a video exactly like her Lightlark pitch would go viral on the BookTok of 2024. But something with its same intent, even its same result? Aster still thinks that’s possible. “Not everything goes viral,” she says, “but even the chance that that could happen, I think, is hopeful.”
