✨🐍🌟The Color of Time by Millie Abecassis - 4 / 5 stars🌟🐍✨
This is a difficult one for me to rate, because I ultimately did enjoy reading it, but not for the reasons that made me pick it up. I picked it up for the sapphic romance, which ended up being an incredibly minor part of the story and was frankly quite underdeveloped. The rest of the story, however, I enjoyed a lot more than I expected. This also managed to be one of the very few novellas I’ve read that has a satisfying end and felt like a complete story, despite how short it is.
The Color of Time is based on one of Charles Perrault’s less well known tales, Peau d’Âne, but retold in a sci-fi setting and with a sapphic romance. Most of the book is told in second-person POV, which I initially figured would be difficult to get used to, but it actually ended up elevating the story and making it somehow feel much more personal and by the end I had grown very fond of this narration style and the relationship it represented. I just thought it worked so beautifully in the context of this specific novella.
As I mentioned previously, the thing that made me pick this book up ended up not actually being very important, namely the sapphic romance. There certainly is a sapphic romance in this, but it is given almost no time to develop, even though it is pivotal for the ending. I still enjoyed this story, but if the author had given the relationship between Cyrelle and Sianna a bit more time to develop, this might have been a 4.5 star read, but as is, it is closer to 4 stars - still definitely something I enjoyed reading, but could’ve been even better.
----
Thank you to Shiraki Press for the ARC