After a decade of marriage as Tranquil Valley’s council representatives, Remi Nomura and Isaiah Won have their routine. Remi handles administration, spells, and making sure Isaiah stays warm during the winter. Isaiah manages townspeople and harnesses his raw magic for big projects. (He’s also responsible for breakfast.) Their quarterly consummation rituals are performed with appropriate seriousness (and predictability).
But when Remi accidentally falls in love with Isaiah, her feelings disrupt their careful balance. (How gauche. They’re co-workers, not lovers.) It’s particularly inconvenient since Isaiah loves their mutual friend Miles Tang.
After her secret shatters both relationships, Remi must decide if hiding her heart is worth the cost, while Isaiah reconsiders everything he thought he knew about love.
Grab a cup of tea and settle in as Remi and Isaiah discover just how loud (and how quiet) love can be in the cozy yet steamy fantasy novella “Love As Soft As a Distant Star,” the first in the Witches’ Council series.
Virginia Duan is an Asian American author who writes K-pop inspired women's fiction and fantasy. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Virginia lives with her husband and five children. (Yes, five.) She spends most of her days plotting her next book or article, shuttling her children about, participating in more group chats than humanly possible, and daydreaming about BTS a totally normal amount.
Virginia Duan's Love As Soft as a Distant Star is the perfect example of a "cozy yet steamy fantasy novella." Remi and Isaiah's chemistry keep things warm and spicy like a good cup of chai tea, and I could have read a hundred more pages about them long after I put down the book. I also very much appreciated the Korean, bisexual, and open relationship representation in the novella, which I don't see a lot of in romance.
There were a whole lot of things I loved about this novella. The characters are richly drawn and seem much more alive than in many novellas. The relationship too, is richly drawn and given room to breathe rather than rushed along. I was left feeling like I had read an entire novel's worth of content which was a welcome surprise - too often novellas leave me unsatisfied and wishing for more depth, more time with the characters.
I LOVE how the love between Isaiah and Remi is shown in all the quiet moments of how they care for each other. There is lust there, but it comes only after the realization of the quiet depth of their affections. That really highlights Remi's asexuality and mirrors her own experience of their relationship. I also really appreciate Isaiah's bisexuality. As someone who is biromantic asexual, their relationship and attraction felt very authentic, especially Remi's experience.
Hwang Woo-jin was having one of his bad days—which was not to be confused with Hwang Woo-jin having a bad day. If it had merely been a bad day, the rapper would have handled it like he handled all of life’s obstacles: minute by minute, moment by moment, head down and teeth gritted.
It was how Woo-jin had survived his childhood after his mother died, and he’d been left with his angry old man and his older brother who’d protected Woo-jin until he’d left for his military service. It was how he’d endured the heartbreak when his father, furious at Woo-jin’s teenage rebellion, had ripped up his notebooks full of lyrics. It was how he’d withstood having his beats stolen early in his career by unscrupulous producers preying on desperate artists.
Woo-jin had weathered the endless hours of his trainee days, writing music and lyrics in the few hours between dance rehearsals and his shifts as a delivery boy for local restaurants. After debut, he’d swallowed the endless humiliation from Korea’s hip-hop community when they’d sneered at Woo-jin for becoming a rapper in a K-pop idol group instead of a hip-hop crew. Even now, nearly two years after his group Dreams of Youth Eternal Nation (DOYEN) had debuted, they still struggled to top the Korean music charts despite experiencing enough international success to be in the middle of a 36-stop tour.
Hwang Woo-jin had suffered through almost 23 years of more bad days than good ones in his young life, and if today had been merely one of those bad days, Woo-jin could have borne it.
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