Posted by Every year I seem to get a theme to my books, where a certain trope or plot point makes it into several of my batch and this year it’s eternal night. I had actually not read this one yet at the time I posted my review for Dawn, my other book that had a strong focus on a lack of sunlight.
This is set in Britain in “our world” but it’s about the events that took place after 10 super volcanos have gone off at once.
Okay.
Okay.
10 super volcanos going off at once… the fact that I got this info on the third or fourth page was either brilliant or terrible because I felt bad DNFing on page 3. It’s such a ludicrous plot point. However even thought I really struggled with going forward, I did keep going because I’ve never DNFed at page 3 before, lol
Okay. So, continuing on, our main character is named London in a post apocalyptical world with no sunlight. I will say that this book DOES address the fact that a lack of sunlight will make it difficult for the plants to grow and so an entire subsection of wizards and witches have been tasked to growing food and plants and making up for the lack of sunlight. Magic has kept the world from going extinct, there are different color paints used to try and make a dark world brighter and make it easier to see, the fact that it’s cold as fuck was addressed — so honestly, although the opening was utterly unbelievable there were world building elements that made sense for most of the book.
So, out of the super volcanos erupted demons and magical creatures thought only to be myth. We’re talking Cerberus dogs, dragons, monsters etc. So, on top of an apocolypse, humanity has to deal with monsters as well. And not just monsters, apparently vampires had been here the whole time but now that the sun is gone they’ve taken over the planet with different Houses ruling the different continents. There’s actually a LOT of world building in this book and I have to say a good deal of it is info dumping as the character contemplates the world around her. I was tolerant of it at first because it was telling me a lot of things I needed to know but they were a little long and a little too frequent right up front.
I did like London, though. She can have sarcastic and witty inner thoughts and banter that actually made me chuckle a few times. She’s got a soft spot for animals, even the nasty ones like the Cerberus dog that most people would either kill and dispose of it, or eat it since food is hard to come by. In that way I found her extremely likable. She named the dog Trio and kept her as a companion. The dialogue also wasn’t bad, and the pacing and scene changes were honestly smooth. It’s the fucking super volcano thing I can’t get over, lol. One going off, okay, we might survive that, but society was just so… in tact? There are different departments for different branches of governments, there are cities built on top of the ruins of old cities, schools, et cetera. I don’t know, perhaps we might be able to fight off the end of the world with magic, but seriously 10 at once???
Anyway, a vampire princess goes missing and London gets hired to try and go and find her since she’s a Knight. She doesn’t want to do it at first because these particular vampires are notoriously monstrous and you could end up as food instead of being paid. But, she decides to go for it, she feels bad that this young girl, despite being a vampire, is only 17 years old and is in trouble. She has a soft spot for the people and animals down on her luck, and as I said, this makes her very likable and easy to root for.
This was just a silly and fun book. It’s ultimately a cut, but I mean, if you want sexy vampires, a really relatable and funny MC, magical animal companions, lots of magic, and a post apocalyptical world this could be for you!