All the Stars and Teeth

All the Stars and Teeth by Adalyn Grace is a YA fantasy following a princess whose magic goes catastrophically wrong, forcing her onto the open sea with a roguish pirate and a kingdom's fate in her hands.

All the Stars and Teeth is Adalyn Grace's 2020 first installment in the All the Stars and Teeth series, introducing Amora Montara - a princess who has spent her entire life preparing for a single moment: the coronation ceremony in which she will demonstrate her blood magic and prove herself worthy of the throne she was born to inherit. When that demonstration goes devastatingly wrong in front of the court she was meant to impress, Amora's carefully constructed future collapses in an instant. Stripped of her crown, her freedom, and the future she has always known, she makes the only choice available to her - she runs. What follows is a sea voyage across a world of island kingdoms, ancient magic, and political allegiances that run far deeper and darker than anything Amora's sheltered life at court prepared her for.

The world Grace builds in All the Stars and Teeth is one of its most immediate pleasures. The Visión archipelago - a collection of island kingdoms, each with its own culture, magic tradition, and relationship to the Montara crown - is rendered with real vibrancy and breadth. Grace uses the voyage structure to move Amora through this world at pace, each island revealing something new about the kingdom she thought she knew and the political intrigue threading through its foundations. The sea itself becomes a constant presence in the novel's texture - shaping its dangers, its freedoms, and the particular kind of intimacy that forms between people thrown together on open water with nowhere else to go. For a debut novel, the world-building is impressively confident: specific enough to feel real, expansive enough to feel genuinely explorable.

At the heart of the book's appeal is its magic system with consequences. The Montara blood magic is powerful, coveted, and costly in ways the novel makes viscerally clear. Amora has been trained in its use since childhood, but training and reality are different things, and All the Stars and Teeth does not flinch from the gap between them. The magic system has rules, history, and a relationship to the political order of the archipelago that Grace weaves through the plot with care - this is not magic as spectacle but magic as world-building infrastructure, and it gives the novel a solidity that elevates it well beyond its genre conventions.

The crew that assembles around Amora across the voyage is where the novel's emotional warmth lives. The found family dynamic Grace builds does not arrive cheaply - the relationships are formed through conflict, mistrust, and the slow accumulation of shared experience - and the result is a group of characters whose bonds feel genuinely earned. Central to this is Bastian, the roguish pirate whose uneasy alliance with Amora provides the novel's central romantic tension. The enemies to allies dynamic between them is constructed with wit and patience, the friction between two people who want incompatible things gradually giving way to something more complicated and more compelling. Grace handles the slow-burn romance with the same instinct she would later bring to the Belladonna series - building tension carefully, resisting easy resolution, and making the reader work for every moment of genuine connection.

Amora herself is a morally grey character in the making - a protagonist shaped by privilege and expectation, whose journey forces her to reckon with what her kingdom actually is beneath the version of it she was raised to believe in. The high stakes fantasy adventure plot that carries her across the archipelago is also, at its core, a story about what it means to lead, what power costs the people subject to it, and whether the future Amora is fighting to reclaim is actually worth the price being asked. Grace does not reduce these questions to simple answers, and that moral seriousness gives All the Stars and Teeth a substance that rewards readers looking for more than surface-level excitement.

All the Stars and Teeth is the debut that announced Adalyn Grace as an author with a clear instinct for emotionally driven, atmospherically rich fantasy - and for readers who have come to her through the Belladonna series, it offers the pleasure of seeing those instincts at their earliest and most energetic expression.