Elaine White's Life in Books

Book – Nevernight (The Nevernight Chronicle #1)
Author – Jay Kristoff
Star rating - ★★★☆☆
No. of Pages – 643

Cover – Love it!
POV – 3rd person, multi-POV
Would I read it again – No

Genre – Fantasy, Assassin, Magic, Death


** COPY RECEIVED THROUGH NETGALLEY **



WARNINGS: scenes of death, poisoning, hanging, gutting, sex


Honestly, I struggled with this one. More than once, within the first half of the book, I contemplated DNF'ing it. Unusually for me, it wasn't the story that was the problem, but the way it was written.

To be concise and not waffle too much, since this book really confused me, I'm going to try to be quick and bulletpoint my problems.

* The Age

Now, it might sound weird, but one of my biggest issues was that we were supposed to believe that all these characters were around the ages of 16. Having sex, being taught seduction, murdering, stealing and all sorts, while arriving at the story with all these skills already in place. Hmm...

* The Writing

Though the “Caveat Emptor” was intriguing and made me want to delve in, by the time we started Chapter 1 I was lost. Not only because, with things like “caveat emptor” instead of the usual “Prologue” there were numerous terms and concepts that I was completely ignorant of and that didn't come with an explanation. But also because the first Chapter was choked up with repeat after repeat. We would have one scene in the present day, then one scene in the past – almost word for word! This was what bothered me. The scenes were nearly identical (clearly trying to point out some growth or mirror image of past/present) with subtle differences (comparing our MC's first time of sex with her first kill) There was also the continuous flashbacks, that ripped me out of the story and didn't often have an obvious bearing on the current situation.

* The Language

The repeats weren't just limited to the first few scenes within the first few chapters. There were literally phrases that were uttered 5-6 times a page
non-cat
O my gentlefriends
There were more, but I grew kind of tired of pointing them out to myself, as I eventually skimmed the first few chapters in my build up to DFN'ing.
There was also the heavy sarcasm of the first half. So many attempts to be hilarious, to tell funny little stories in the footnotes and to – how I read it – take the piss out of fantasy novels in every way possible. In amongst all of that, was a really heavy pouring of metaphors and comparisons, until it felt more like reading a spoof of a fantasy novel than a real one.

* Footnotes

The footnotes in this book were the bane of my existence. Maybe it was due to the formatting (since this was an ARC, it was unformatted), but some of the relevant footnotes were pages away. One of them, I counted, was 7 pages away. Just to find out something that was kind of obvious anyway, with a mass history lesson thrown in along with a dose of sarcasm. I kept having to stop reading, go searching for the relevant footnote, then find my way back again

The footnotes broke up the flow of the story, to provide forced humorous snippets, narrator comments and stories that had no bearing on the plot or recent events, but were considered funny anecdotes, with few really necessary breaks for background information. Some of the important stuff could easily have been added into the main story text, without removing anything from the scene.

But, quite honestly, by 14% I'd reached footnote 36 and had given up reading them. I was so frustrated with the constant search, the confusion, the break in the flow that meant I could never really “settle” into the story, that I began skimming them for relevant information and bypassing them if they held nothing of immediate interest.

* Characters

For me, Mia wasn't a main character that I could really connect with. She wasn't awful, but I just never really merged well with her. I understood her, believed in her motives and wasn't angry that she took up 99% of the POV, but I still think she wasn't quite right in certain ways. She ignored obvious signs, despite being written as this near perfect, plain little assassin. She was blind to a lot of things that were obvious, selfish and had an ego like I don't know what. She wasn't written to be loveable, but I didn't really find her all that likeable, either. She was more of a means to an end. A character that I knew was the main focus, because she was the Harry Potter style, LOTR, every-fantasy-novel-needs-one Chosen One. She could do nothing wrong, she complained all the time about “this isn't fair” and “woe is me” because of what happened to her as a child. Others had suffered worse, but she was the one who was portrayed as having the greatest grievance, the biggest heart, the most sincere, the best motivation...blah, blah, blah. You get the point. She was little miss perfect.

There were some characters – namely Hush and Tric – that I really loved, bonded with and wanted to read more of, but who never got the time they deserved. Hush was a silent, but mysterious character that I wanted to know more about. Tric was intriguing, fun and sweet, but he was limited to being first Mia's friend, then lover and he never really got to grow beyond that, despite being incredibly talented. I feel like both were given such strong characterisation, with talents and gifts that could have been better used within the story, but were both actually relegated to background character when they deserved their own show.

* Narrator

The entire story is told by a narrator, who was “in love” with Mia. Well, while reading the story, it's clear who that would be. It's also clear that there is no logical way that ANYONE could narrate this story for her, since half of the really important things that happened in it didn't happen anywhere near her or the supposed narrator, so just how do they know about it? It's all left a little unclear.


* Beauty

This one really annoyed me. All throughout the story, there is this really strong undercurrent of judgment. Mia is a plain girl, and thus has to be “improved” by the Weaver. In fact, ALL recruits (even those already decent looking) are transformed by the Weaver for a class that teaches...sex. Seduction. To kids who are sixteen!

But, besides the fact that they are transformed and, despite all their reservations, are surprisingly astoundingly happy about it (*glares*), there is another element to the entitlement of beauty within the pages. And that's how Naev and Mirelle are treated. Now, Mirelle is a naturally “ugly” person, because with each ounce of beauty she gifts to another with her Weaving, the more “ugly” it makes her, until she's “grotesque” and no one can stand to look at her. Right. Because any women not stunningly beautiful can only be loved by her twisted, blood-sucking brother. Of course.

Then we come to Naev. In love with the wrong man and tortured for it, by...wait for it...having her face brutally disfigured. So...as punishment for doing something another person sees as wrong, she's made “ugly” and no one can bear to look at her, either. In fact, the all-wonderful Mia is the only one who gives her the time of day. Because she's perfect like that.






~

Quite honestly, this book gave me a headache. A real, physical headache, trying to navigate the footnotes, the confusion, the often hard to read fonts, the many twists and the constant jumping from one part of the story to another, without always knowing why. There was so much world building, but no real exploration of that world – we had the bones of the world, in words, terms and visual images, but none of it made sense, because we were left floundering for far too long, trying to figure out what it all meant. We were never told what a “turn” amounted to, what numerous words and phrases meant within this world, because they were so completely foreign to anything we know.

There were a few too many incidences where we were supposed to know, somehow, that we were talking about an event in the future, which we would then – pages later – come back to experience firsthand from the beginning. And, due to the unformatted state of the file I received, we often had blank lines between paragraphs, so when those were supposed to represent a gap in time that was sometimes hours, sometimes day or weeks, it became confusing to read, because it all blended into one.

When it comes to editing, I have a few missing words that often complicate the way the sentence read or made sense, as well as the formatting issues mentioned above. There were a few times where I wondered if I'd missed something important because of missing phrases or if I'd mis-read things, when the name of the wrong character appeared in a scene/sentence. But, the biggest editing issue was in continuity. There were a few times that people did things that they'd been expressly told wasn't possible, such as Mia attempting to solve Spiderkiller's riddle, despite her previous punishment being that she wasn't allowed to enter that trial to win it and, as far as I knew, that punishment was never revoked, so it was frustrating to read so much of Mia's attempts to solve it, while knowing that she shouldn't be wasting time on it.

~

Overall, it was just too confusing. The underlying story was good and by the 50% mark - upon reaching The Red Church - really took off, leaving behind the footnotes, the confusion, the unnecessary flashbacks and all the little problems of the writing style. But then the character flaws entered and it dimmed the relief. While I enjoyed the last half of the journey – getting to meet the recruits, actually see them training as assassins and such – too many good characters were murdered for too little gain and I found the villains to be less than frightening.

I won't be reading the next book in the series. Remus' last words were not the big plot twist they should have been, as it was a little obvious. I don't really care what happened to 'the one that got away' in the last chapter and though one of my favourite characters has survived to the end of the book and into book 2, I'm not intrigued enough or inspired to think that his background character status will change, to pick up the next one.

Mia's journey isn't over. But mine is. At least with her story.