A faery prince hero and a magic-filled plot are more than enough to perk up my ears. Disappointingly, I found myself unable to become engrossed in Kissed by Starlight. The initial setup was enchanting, but it became heavily bogged down with uninteresting, intrusive secondary characters and an excess of needless plot threads.

In England in the year 1789, Felicia Starret, mourning the death of her beloved father, cries upon the feet of a gorgeous male statue and a miraculous thing happens – he becomes a living, breathing man!

She is certain she’s lost her mind when he declares that he is Blaic, an enchanted faery prince. He was cursed by his king and has spent the last 650 years as a statue until Felicia’s tears released him. Once she touches him she learns that he is now in her service and asks her what she desires most.

Now that Felicia’s kindly dad is gone, she is forced to live with an evil step-mother who despises her and who wants her out of her sight permanently – ASAP. Felicia desperately wants to leave but does not want to abandon her beloved sister Clarice, a young woman with the mind of a child. When Blaic makes his offer, Felicia doesn’t hesitate; she asks him to cure her sister so that she may leave with a clear conscience. Hooked yet? I sure was. Too bad things started to go down hill from there.

Rather than concentrating on the fanciful aspects of the relationship, the author begins to weave into her already full plate several threads whose only apparent purpose is to provide the reader with further proof of how noble and selfless her heroine is. Any astute reader would have already determined that upon hearing Felicia’s first thought was to save her sister rather than better herself. I liked her immediately and found her following escapades ( including a stint in jail to save a bunch of mistreated criminals and becoming a surrogate mother to abandoned children) nothing more than overkill. In fact, these other threads so overwhelmed the love story that any initial spark the characters may have had all but disappeared until the very end of the book. They had little time to communicate because they had so many other things to deal with. Don’t get me wrong – their romance was charming, but there was too little of it and this book was only 300 pages long.

Another problem was the deluge of annoying secondary characters, mostly servants, who popped in and out but had way too much dialogue, most of which went like this: “Miss Felicia, I niver zee this afore, zurely?” This type of dialogue slowed me down and threw me right out of the story.

This book is a sequel to Flowers By Moonlight, a book I have not read but probably should have, because it tells the story of the woman behind the hero’s curse and probably answers a few of the questions that pop up. Perhaps the book’s status as a sequel also figures in the few disturbing and confusing sequencing errors that forced me to do a double take.

Despite all of my complaints I truly liked the heroine and enjoyed the hero. Felicia tells him flat out to go away, but he’s a tenacious, honorable man. The author does a good job of melding reality with the fantasy world, and that kept me interested. If only she had done away with most of the subplots, made the relationship top priority and increased the banter between the hero and heroine. Then this could have been a keeper. I look forward to seeing what she has to offer in the future, and I hope she finds a pickier editor.