When it comes to saving the world, you can’t just leave a job half-finished. Half-measures just won’t cut it. 

 

Foul Days, the first half of this duology, was an intriguing surprise from debut author Genoveva Dimova earlier this year. I remarked at the time that it felt like a lot of brilliant ideas that hadn’t been brought together so smoothly but that I was very interested in reading Monstrous Nights because I really wanted to see where the story was going because I truly think Dimova is fabulously talented and very creative. Foul Days was just a bit rough. 

 

You can see in Monstrous Nights that some of that roughness has been smoothed out. There are still some issues with character consistency and there are times when I felt like both of our main characters were being far too melodramatic for both their ages and constitutions, but since the machinery of this book was oiled so well and a lot of the unevenness from the first book seems to have been ironed out in this second half it made that issue much easier to brush away in favor of enjoying the world and story. 

 

I really enjoyed this duology as a whole, especially when it came to worldbuilding, the variety of monsters pulled from Balkan folklore, and the creative ways they are used in the story. It was all really refreshing material that you don’t see much of and I really wish there were more authors out there writing fantastic stories about the lesser-known mythologies. 

 

I was provided a copy of this title by the author and publisher via Netgalley. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you. 

 

File Under: Book Series/Fantasy/Romantasy/Fantasy Series/Urban Fantasy