Title: Nevernight
Series: The Nevernight Chronicle #1
Author: Jay Kristoff
Genre: Dark Fantasy
Trigger Warnings: Death, death of animals, blood (from wounds and also characters going into pools of it), gore, dismemberment, torture, poison, explicit sex (male/female), body horror, excrement
Back Cover:
In a land where three suns almost never set, a fledgling killer joins a school of assassins, seeking vengeance against the powers who destroyed her family.
Daughter of an executed traitor, Mia Corvere is barely able to escape her father’s failed rebellion with her life. Alone and friendless, she hides in a city built from the bones of a dead god, hunted by the Senate and her father’s former comrades. But her gift for speaking with the shadows leads her to the door of a retired killer, and a future she never imagined.
Now, Mia is apprenticed to the deadliest flock of assassins in the entire Republic—the Red Church. If she bests her fellow students in contests of steel, poison and the subtle arts, she’ll be inducted among the Blades of the Lady of Blessed Murder, and one step closer to the vengeance she desires. But a killer is loose within the Church’s halls, the bloody secrets of Mia’s past return to haunt her, and a plot to bring down the entire congregation is unfolding in the shadows she so loves.
Will she even survive to initiation, let alone have her revenge?
Review:
Cover? Very pretty. Idea? I’m always down for assassin schools. Author? I’d read one of his books before and remember it being fairly good. And then I almost gave up on it in the middle of the first chapter.
So let’s start with the bad: This book is horribly, horribly overwritten. The idea is that our main character became a legend somewhere and this book is a story told by some sort of bard or storyteller explaining how she got to be a legend. Jay is trying for “lyrical old-fashioned bard” style and ended up with “most pretentious writer to ever pretentious.” It’s quite off-putting.
So is the fact that the story’s told out of order in the beginning, jumping back and forth between backstory and present without being clear which is when, and it’s incredibly confusing. (The unexpected sex scene in chapter one, before we’ve learned Mia’s name or anything else about her, was off-putting, too.) But for some reason I can’t really articulate, I pushed through it, and it actually ended up being good. The writing style didn’t get better, but the flashbacks mostly stopped happening after page 100 and there were only two more sex scenes, both of which had a little bit of build-up so I knew where to skim. (I don’t like sex scenes in books, but that’s just my preference.) It turned out to be a pretty enjoyable story.
This book is incredibly, almost gratuitously gory and violent. You say, “It’s a book about assassin school, I’m not surprised.” To which I say, “No, I think you’re underestimating just how gory and violent this book is.” Many people die painfully. Mia gets tortured a couple times. Mia both inflicts and receives a ridiculous amount of pain. Characters get literally submerged in blood. And every bit of it gets described in excruciating detail. I like assassin books as much as the next person and even I thought the violence was a little much.
There’s a lot of really interesting worldbuilding in this book (although most of it was done through footnotes and I haven’t decided if that’s unique and cool or a cop-out). Mia was also a pretty solid character – dedicated to revenge, stubborn, possessing a few abilities beyond normal that make her more of a competitor than she would seem, and pretty much a classic assassin school protagonist. The plot was pretty good, and I didn’t predict the twist at the end. Excepting the writing style, it’s a solid story.
Nevernight is first in a series, but I’m not really sure I want to continue it. This book was good, don’t get me wrong, but the threads left hanging at the end of this one weren’t super compelling. Despite Mia having more revenging to do and the surprise bad guy of this book getting away, I feel like it wrapped up pretty well. I’m satisfied. And I’m also not sure I want to go reading about this level of gratuitous violence again anytime soon.
The Nevernight Chronicle:
- Nevernight
- Godsgrave
- Darkdawn
Bluejay Reads 