Nevernight by Jay Kristoff
Goodreads Description: 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?
I received an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. I am going to throw this out there and say that this might not be my final review of this book. Right now I am marking it as DNF, because I don’t want to read it anymore and I’m not sure when I will pick it up again. Right now though, I am done with it.
I got through 14% of the book and it was kind of hard for me to read it and the first 14% was boring to me. Nevernight has footnotes, but the footnotes are at the end of the chapters. Trying to read footnotes in this eARC was annoying, because you had to skip to the end of the chapter and then go find where you stopped. Some footnotes are pointless and others give a lot of information that could possibly be useful to the story.
Reading it on an e-reader was difficult and annoying! I think it will be a lot easier with a finished copy to flip through back and forth. I hope that they put them at the bottom of the pages that they correspond with in the finished copy (especially for the e-book). I had to use TWO different devices just to read this book. I had to read from one and then have the other opened to the footnotes just so I didn’t have to keep going back and forth and having to find my place. The annoyance and frustration of that made it hard for me to really focus and enjoy the story.
I honestly don’t even know what was going on half of the time or if I ever really knew. At one point I tried not to read the footnotes, but then I started to feel guilty that I was skipping them. I also felt like I was missing something. The writing itself was just too much at times. There was metaphor after metaphor and some descriptions were unnecessary and a lot of it just didn’t make sense. It gave me a headache trying to figure out what Kristoff was trying to say. I am not having the best of luck with Kristoff books, because I really didn’t enjoy Illuminae and I don’t know how I feel about this one right now.
It seems like it could be interesting, but right now it’s more of an annoyance to read and reading shouldn’t be this difficult! I still want to give it a chance and I will once it gets released and my library has a copy available. I only read 14% of the book, but right now I don’t plan to read anymore of it. It might be easier to read as a finished book and not as an eARC. For now, it’s a DNF for me.
Have you read Nevernight? Do you plan to?
I hope you have a great day!
socially awkward bookworm. 