Originally posted to I Should Read That

This is a spoiler-free review for Darkdawn, but will contain spoilers for Nevernight and Godsgrave.

The Nevernight Chronicles has been one of my favourite series since I discovered it about this time last year. I loved Nevernight, absolutely adored Godsgrave, and therefore had sky-high expectations for the concluding book, Darkdawn. Unfortunately after two amazing books, the final installment in this series was a serious disappointment. I am going to keep this review on the shorter side, as I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone who hasn't read it yet!

So here’s the thing: there were parts of Darkdawn that I loved. I absolutely adored certain new characters, I shrieked with delight when we found out the identity of the mysterious narrator, and I enjoyed everything that had to do with Mia’s revenge story. There were, however, a number of places where Kristoff lost me. A lot of this comes down to personal preference, so take all of this all with a grain of salt.

As always, the world of the Nevernight Chronicles is fantastic. I really loved revisiting old locations and settings, as well as discovering new ones. I always love anything that has to do with the darkin, and we continue to learn more about the lore of this world. We also dive deeper into the more, as I call it, fantasy-y side of the story. We are introduced to this in Godsgrave, however it completely dominates the story in Darkdawn. I really didn’t enjoy this particular aspect of the story, which meant that I didn't enjoy the majority of the plot. I found it so far off from the story I fell in love with -- Mia's tale of revenge and murder.

I think my biggest issue with the book is Mia and her story arc. For me, she’s always toed the line between being completely and totally awesome and a total caricature. In Nevernight and Godsgrave, she was such an incredible character and in Darkdawn, she just seemed ridiculous and like a parody of herself. I didn’t feel like she was acting like the character I've come to know over the course of the series and some of the decisions she made just didn’t make any sense. The Mia Corvere I know and love wasn’t present in Darkdawn.

The rest of my thoughts on this book are super spoilery, so I’m going to leave this review here. To me, the pacing in Darkdawn was off, the characters were off, and the plot was off. To me, Darkdawn felt more like poorly written fanfiction* than the concluding book in one of my favourite series. While there were some bits I really loved, I mostly found Darkdawn underwhelming and disappointing.



*I hope it’s obvious that this is not a knock on fanfiction, but I’m including this note here anyway. After all, we Nevernight fans do love a footnote.