EDIT 16/06/20: After what's come out about Brooklyn Ray/Taylor B. Barton regarding mistreatment of authors of colour, especially Black authors, I will no longer be reading or recommending their books. (Specifics on what they've done can be found by looking up their former Twitter handle)


content warnings: death, blood magic, violence
representation: main m/m relationship, trans main character, side m/m relationship, side f/f relationship, minor non-binary character

This was so fucking good!! Darkling is a novella about a witch, Ryden, in the spooky town of Port Lewis who has many secrets, including ones about his feelings towards a friend and the true nature of his magic.

I loved all the characters. Even if I didn't like them as people, they were incredibly well-drawn for such a short novella. And the romance, oh my god, the romance. It! Was! So! Damn! Good! It's friends-to-lovers which is a trope I'm normally not a fan of, but in this case the relationship happens so early in the book that it doesn't fall into the usual traps of friends-to-lovers, i.e. so much miscommunication angst that it makes me want to neck myself. Instead this romance was just fucking cute, and the (many) sex scenes were really well-done.

The plot surrounding Ryden's powers and the way it impacts the witch community in their town was really interesting, and I liked that Brooklyn Ray used it as a way to explain the dynamics between different families of witches and explain certain aspects of the magic system.

If you need some more witchy reads (especially heading into October) I would highly recommend this one.