★★★★★
- Author: Jay Kristoff
- Genre: Fantasy
- Page Count: 429
- Date Started: August 1st
- Date Ended: August 13
A Brief Description
Nevernight by Jay Kristoff tells the story of Mia Corvere, the daughter of an executed traitor. She gains admittance into a school of assassins called the Red Church. There she learns the art of death, blades, poisons and treachery. Along with a shadow not-cat, named Mr. Kindly she seeks a way to gain revenge against the Republic that destroyed her family and took everything from her.
The books we love, they love us back.
Jay Kristoff
pg 243
Initial Thoughts
Some things I will say about this book is that it is not for the faint of heart. This is not something that I would classify as “young adult” and it is definitely for adults or mature teens. It is dark, gory, and gritty. It goes into explicit detail in certain scenes, so if you tend to shy away from violence or gore, I would highly recommend skipping this one. The writing in this is very lyrical and VERY metaphorical. It did take me some time to get into this. The writing being so metaphorical threw me off at first and it took me a while to get into it, but once I got into it, I was IN. I would stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning just devouring this book, which is something I have not done in a very long time. I highly recommend this to anyone who is into adult fantasy with fantastic world building and stories that are very character driven. The next sections may be spoiler-y, so please keep that in mind going forward.
Too many books…too few centuries.
Jay Kristoff
pg 359
Characters
Mia is morally gray and very unlikable at times, but you still root for her. You feel her pain and struggling and it is explained to you in graphic detail. Her struggles to come to terms with her loss and her pain is raw and not shied away from. One thing I appreciated about this book is that it shows that Mia is not good at everything to start out. Mia needs to work to become good. She is no Mary Sue. She undergoes quite a bit of character development as well.
At first I was really ambivalent about Tric. Tric is a Dweymeri acolyte (what the school calls students). I didn’t know how to feel about him and I could sort of tell from the beginning that he was going to be posed as the love interest. I was a little meh about him at first but as the novel went on, you could tell that he truly cared about Mia. It’s not insta-love which is a nice change of pace. I feel like the romance progressed naturally and the sexy scenes are… whew. <Spoiler ahead, skip to next paragraph> I was heartbroken with how his arc ended and I really need to know if he’s okay.
My favorite character out of the whole book has to be Mr. Kindly. Mr. Kindly is Mia shadow not-cat that lives in her shadow. I… LOVE… Mr. Kindly. He adds some very much needed comic relief to an otherwise dark story.
There are some characters that you come to love and others that you come to hate. Jay Kristoff does a good job of making you hate certain characters, but I would love to see some of these more fleshed out. I’m interested to see where the character arcs go in the rest of the series. Another thing to add is that Jay Kristoff does not shy away from killing off characters. If you have read this, there is a particular character death that really gets me.
Final Thoughts
I am very interested to see where this story goes. The story was high octane, and while it had moments of slow-ness it kept me engrossed and kept me hooked. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves grim, dark fantasy stories and who doesn’t mind some descriptive scenes. I gave this a 5 stars and am planning on jumping into the second book, Godsgrave right away. Give me your opinions in the comments below. Have you read this book? What did you think?
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