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tani's review against another edition
3.0
I read this as part of my quest to get some of the shorter things off my to-read list and actually feel like I was making a bit of progress on it. Thankfully, it's free on Kindle, which was a nice surprise. An even better surprise was that it's well-written and pretty tightly plotted. However, I didn't really find it compelling either. I didn't form any attachment to any of the characters, and it took me almost a month to read this itty-bitty thing. I just didn't feel compelled it pick it up. There's not much to pinpoint as lacking, but I never got drawn in. And thanks to the format of the story, I will be leaving this story where it ends. This is a story that's sold in five parts, so although this installment ends without a terrible cliffhanger, the story is by no means complete. If I'd had the entire story in front of me, I probably would have continued and read the whole thing. But since I did not, and since this first part didn't really grab me, I think I'm going to count this as a good effort, but not for me.
mdpenguin's review against another edition
3.0
I'm being generous with the third star: it's somewhere between a two and a three. This isn't something that I'd have read while it was being serialized, but if it were then I'd have stopped with this book. I actually have the omnibus edition so I'll finish the whole thing off, but I'm rating them as I go along. It's not that this is bad, it's just that I don't really find the characters that believable or interesting. There's enough development of the main character and her relationships to the other characters that it works, but Al just doesn't seem that realistic to me. And the story is mostly just chaos through this book. The descriptions of that chaos are strong but it mostly doesn't make sense at this point. There are definitely places it can go, but I really would have needed more of a hint as to what's going on to hold my attention. As things develop in the later books I may revise my opinions.
*Addendum* Having finished the five books, I think that Bilodeau is great at painting imagery with words, be it horrific, magical, or beautiful. And she did come up with a nice story. She just didn't do a good enough job of building the world or the people in it to really make me care. Relationships and characters that are explained at the beginning seemed flat to me. I was able to get into the relationships that are built within the novel with new characters, but it took until book 3 for me to find the world interesting and book 4 was the first where I actually cared about the people. The overall novel -- all five books together -- comes out as three stars because of the strength of the last two books (though I found the ending a little flat). It could have been so much more, but there was enough good in the last bit of it to make the time invested in the first two books worth it.
*Addendum* Having finished the five books, I think that Bilodeau is great at painting imagery with words, be it horrific, magical, or beautiful. And she did come up with a nice story. She just didn't do a good enough job of building the world or the people in it to really make me care. Relationships and characters that are explained at the beginning seemed flat to me. I was able to get into the relationships that are built within the novel with new characters, but it took until book 3 for me to find the world interesting and book 4 was the first where I actually cared about the people. The overall novel -- all five books together -- comes out as three stars because of the strength of the last two books (though I found the ending a little flat). It could have been so much more, but there was enough good in the last bit of it to make the time invested in the first two books worth it.
pineapplefury's review
4.0
I read all five instalments in this serialized book in one go, and so the following is a review for the story as a whole:
I quite liked Nigh! Definitely different from your usual fae stories in a lot of ways, and much darker than I was anticipating when I first picked up the book. Nigh follows Al, a mechanic, as she struggles to deal with the veil between the human and fae worlds falling.
The thing that stands out to me about this story, aside from the frequently vivd and lovely descriptions, is the unexpectedness of it. I was never quite sure where the story was going to go next, never certain where we were going to end up. This had a destabilizing effect that I think mostly worked - the characters, of course, were similarly destabilized throughout the story.
In the end, I was satisfied by both the journey and the resolution, and the way that the various threads were tied up, though I was definitely worried for a little bit there that I wouldn’t be! I could honestly have read much more of this - I’m fascinated by the combination of human/fae world, and would have loved to se a lot more of how that world functioned.
I quite liked Nigh! Definitely different from your usual fae stories in a lot of ways, and much darker than I was anticipating when I first picked up the book. Nigh follows Al, a mechanic, as she struggles to deal with the veil between the human and fae worlds falling.
The thing that stands out to me about this story, aside from the frequently vivd and lovely descriptions, is the unexpectedness of it. I was never quite sure where the story was going to go next, never certain where we were going to end up. This had a destabilizing effect that I think mostly worked - the characters, of course, were similarly destabilized throughout the story.
In the end, I was satisfied by both the journey and the resolution, and the way that the various threads were tied up, though I was definitely worried for a little bit there that I wouldn’t be! I could honestly have read much more of this - I’m fascinated by the combination of human/fae world, and would have loved to se a lot more of how that world functioned.
hteph's review
3.0
I have an omnibus of the three short books in is series. But I review it on the first book only, because I probably wait with readings he other ones....
This book wasn't so much fey as a horror short-story with some themes from fairytales and folk-lore. It went from normal to strange in one breath and didn't really build any suspension or connection with the MCs.
So I found it a bit boring, but with some interesting elements that may keep me reading it ... another time.
This book wasn't so much fey as a horror short-story with some themes from fairytales and folk-lore. It went from normal to strange in one breath and didn't really build any suspension or connection with the MCs.
So I found it a bit boring, but with some interesting elements that may keep me reading it ... another time.
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