Cait Corrain Books

Corrain's publishing story is short and it ends badly. Del Rey, the science fiction and fantasy imprint at Random House, acquired Crown of Starlight in a two-book deal, with Daphne Press picking up UK rights. The pitch was a queer science fiction retelling of the Ariadne and Dionysus myth, and it landed in exactly the moment when mythological retellings and space-opera romance were both selling well. Pre-publication buzz was real. The book was scheduled for 2024, ARCs were circulating, and readers who track debut lists had it flagged.

In December 2023, a group of readers compiled and published a document showing roughly eight Goodreads accounts that had been giving Crown of Starlight five stars while leaving one-star ratings and hostile reviews on other 2024 debuts. A disproportionate number of the targeted authors were writers of colour. Corrain's first public response was that a friend named Lilly had done it out of misplaced loyalty, a claim she supported with screenshots of a Discord conversation. The friend did not exist and the screenshots were fabricated. She then posted a longer apology admitting she had created the accounts herself, attributing the behaviour to a psychological breakdown. Within days Del Rey and Daphne Press had cancelled their contracts and her literary agent, Rebecca Podos, had dropped her as a client.

There is no honest way to tell you what her writing is like, because almost nobody has read it. A handful of early reviewers received ARCs before the cancellation, and their impressions are scattered and unverifiable. This page exists as a record rather than a recommendation. If you came here from a list of upcoming romantasy authors and wondered why Crown of Starlight never showed up on a shelf, this is the answer. We would rather say plainly that a book does not exist than quietly leave a placeholder that implies it does.

For the same reason, there is no heat rating here. Our book spice ratings are assigned from the text, and a text nobody can buy cannot be rated. The marketing copy suggested a romance-forward story with a forbidden love core, which would typically land somewhere in the 2 to 3 band, but that is inference from a blurb and we are not going to present it as a fact.

The reason this matters to romantasy readers has less to do with one author and more to do with how the genre's discovery machinery works. Romantasy is unusually dependent on pre-publication word of mouth. Goodreads shelving, ARC reviews, and BookTok anticipation lists move books months before release, and until this incident, Goodreads allowed unrestricted rating of unpublished titles. The Corrain case pushed that vulnerability into mainstream news coverage and forced a conversation about review manipulation, retaliation against marginalised debut authors, and how much weight a pre-release star average deserves. Goodreads has since tightened moderation around unpublished titles. Debut authors now talk openly about review bombing in a way they mostly did not before.

Where to start, then. Not here. There is no book to recommend and there will not be one; as of 2026 Crown of Starlight remains unpublished and unrepresented, and Corrain has not resurfaced under this name. If you arrived looking for a mythological retelling with a romance spine, The Song of Achilles and Circe by Madeline Miller are the genre's high-water marks and both are widely available. If the appeal was specifically Ariadne, Jennifer Saint's Ariadne covers the same source material from the labyrinth outward. And if what you actually wanted was a queer romantasy debut from that same 2024 cohort, several of the authors Corrain targeted went on to publish good books, which is the closing detail worth carrying away from all of this.