Review: Nevernight by Jay Kristoff
posted at Friday, July 29th, 2016 at 8:00 AM | Reviews, Young Adult
I received this book for free from ALA in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Nevernight by Jay Kristoff Series: The Nevernight Chronicle #1
Published by Thomas Dunne on August 9, 2016
Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 448
Format: ARC
Source: ALA
Amazon • The Book Depository
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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?
As Nevernight is my fifth Kristoff novel since 2012, clearly he’s a favorite. I make time for every book, and I’ve loved them all. It’s rare that I can say that about an author’s books, but, thus far, Kristoff has pulled off this feat. At the start of Nevernight, I thought maybe this would be the one that didn’t completely work for me, but by the end of the book I was completely sucked into the world, the characters, and the plot. Seriously, how does this man do it? Not only has he published five amazing books in a row, but they’re all LONG. And a sixth comes out in October. Literally, how? ‘Haps he is a darkin and gets the shadows to write for him.
The reason the pace caused problems for me all comes down to the flashbacks. For all of Nevernight‘s Book 1, each chapter opens with a flashback of several pages before switching to the present timeline. Flashbacks can often be problematic in usage, and I don’t think this is the best use of them, though it’s certainly nowhere near the hot mess of Arrow. I have two issues with the flashbacks. First off, I felt like some of the flashbacks were almost repetitive because some of the back story related in them had already been explained in the current timeline; sure, there was a bit more detail, but it didn’t feel precisely necessary. Second, these flashbacks completely disrupted the flow of the narrative. I’d be completely absorbed in Mia’s modern timeline only to arrive at a flashback and, disappointed, I’d switch to another book. Obviously mileage may vary on this, but the book picked up so much for me when I got to Book 2. For my part, I’d have preferred if the flashbacks had been a book of their own and the story had proceeded linearly. The couple of flashbacks in the later Books were much better integrated and had the information the reader really wanted/needed about Mia’s past.
The footnotes are the other slight hindrance I had with Nevernight. Kristoff uses a narrative style I don’t see very often these days: a specific Narrator chronicling the life of our heroine. He inserts himself into the story by means of footnotes, some of which are purely educational in nature and some of which add the Narrator’s personal view on something. The latter were humorous and delightful, but the former, frankly, read like a textbook. I skipped most of the latter, because the detail was more than I could ever remember a year from now anyway.
As I’ve said, I started getting much more engrossed when I reached Book 2. Then somewhere around the middle of the book, I became completely hooked and could not put the book down (except to sleep because I’m an adult and I have to work and blah—but I was late the next morning because I HAD TO FINISH BEFORE WORK I COULD NOT WAIT UNTIL 5:30 ARE YOU KIDDING). As with many great fantasy novels, Nevernight needed time to build up the world, the plot, and the characters, but once that’s in place, holy shit is it an amazing ride.
Since I know I’m surrounded by YA readers in my bookish corner of the internet, I have a comparison for you. You know that scene in Crown of Midnight where Celaena snaps and goes on an assassin murder rampage and is basically wading in the blood and bodies of her enemies? Most of this book is like that. On several occasions, the characters literally do bathe in blood, so yeah. For those who didn’t like the Throne of Glass series because the assassin was not assassin-y enough, Nevernight is most assuredly the book for you.
It gave me great delight to tag Nevernight as a boarding school book, because it sort of is. Mia, whose father was sentenced to death for being a traitor to his country, searches for vengeance. Much like Arya Stark, she plans to kill the men involved in the plot to take down her father. To this end, she trains in her home city. Once he has taught her all he can, he sends Mia to find the Red Church, which worships the goddess of Night and Death and basically is Assassin Church.
Brutal as the school is, though, it is, fascinatingly, the happiest Mia has been since her childhood, since her father’s death. On her way to the school, Mia was hard and, over the course of her time at the school, she softens. Oh, she also becomes more skilled in the arts of murder and kills bunches of people, don’t worry about that. However, she also has friends and cares in a way the rest of them find rather strange. Mia goes from this inscrutable badass bitch to a badass bitch with a marshmallow center, deep under the layers of steel and blood. It’s amazing how likable she becomes, even while slaughtering.
I really did not expect this review to end up so fucking massive but whatever. I had to tell you guys how amazing this book was. There’s a reason Kristoff is one of my favorite authors. If you haven’t read any Kristoff yet, what are you doing with your life?
Favorite Quote:
“The last thing you will ever be is someone’s hero, girl. But you will be a girl heroes fear.”
Tl;dr – Review in a GIFfy:
[…] the review I linked too in the aforementioned previous post. But then A Reader of Fictions posted her own review that made it very clear she ranked Nevernight up there with her all-time […]