The general concept is fine, but I think the game would benefit a lot from some quality-of-life tweaks. In particular, adding extra highlight to items hovered over would help a lot (might be limited to a certain distance within the candle). Also, I had trouble grabbing the books for some reason, taking away some of my precious candle time. Finally, I'd much prefer if colour options were integrated with the game UI, rather than staying hidden away in the settings.
Unless you deliberately aim for a meta-screwy gameplay, the interaction options available to the player should be properly discoverable (and if you do aim for meta-screwy gameplay, it doesn't count until you need to edit a save file somewhere, I suppose 🙃).
I feel the game needs to provide a few more hints than what it currently does; in particular, the numbers on the books where an anti-hint since they didn't really matter at all, and it wasn't clear to me I needed to spell out the name of the person on the portrait. On that note, did you know that "Son Winter" is one of valid anagrams?
I really like the art and the voicelines were a nice touch too. I feel if the mechanics were polished a bit - and maybe there would be no candle extinguishing altogether (some could be used to measure hours) - the game could become quite approachable for casual players, which going by GDD seem to be one of intended audiences.