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A review by spaceglue
In the Ravenous Dark by A.M. Strickland
challenging
dark
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.75
I’ll try to keep this spoiler-free! (I listened to the audiobook btw)
I had a hard time staying focused for this one. Something about the writing style made it difficult to visualize, but that could be personal preference. The characters, while diverse and providing interesting queer rep, didn’t feel especially detailed. All personalities felt like the sum of a single descriptor—so most characters felt flat.
Information about the world was delivered in a manner that felt very unnatural to me. Almost as if characters were blurting out entire chunks of a history textbook to us. I recall feeling very much taken out of the atmosphere on multiple occasions because of it. The lore itself was interesting, and I think there’s groundwork for an amazing fantasy world, but it suffered from what might have been lack of space? Perhaps it was too short for the type of world the book was building. Either way, a lot of the lore drops felt heavy-handed.
The romance didn’t intrigue me as much as I thought it would. There’s clear enemies to lovers vibes within the summary that you expect, and for both love interests there’s supposed to be an element of that. For one, it feels like it works a bit, but the other gave me insta-love vibes and didn’t have a good base for much to build. Yet build it did. To be quite honest, the romance felt secondary and by the end I was more interested in how they’d “save the day” than how they would live happily ever after.
Overall, I wanted to love this book. I was enticed by the premise and themes that were summarized. I think it just didn’t hit on any of the topics I really wanted. I was halfway through the book and contemplated dropping it just out of disinterest, but decided to see it through to the end. I had a middling experience for a majority of it.
I had a hard time staying focused for this one. Something about the writing style made it difficult to visualize, but that could be personal preference. The characters, while diverse and providing interesting queer rep, didn’t feel especially detailed. All personalities felt like the sum of a single descriptor—so most characters felt flat.
Information about the world was delivered in a manner that felt very unnatural to me. Almost as if characters were blurting out entire chunks of a history textbook to us. I recall feeling very much taken out of the atmosphere on multiple occasions because of it. The lore itself was interesting, and I think there’s groundwork for an amazing fantasy world, but it suffered from what might have been lack of space? Perhaps it was too short for the type of world the book was building. Either way, a lot of the lore drops felt heavy-handed.
The romance didn’t intrigue me as much as I thought it would. There’s clear enemies to lovers vibes within the summary that you expect, and for both love interests there’s supposed to be an element of that. For one, it feels like it works a bit, but the other gave me insta-love vibes and didn’t have a good base for much to build. Yet build it did. To be quite honest, the romance felt secondary and by the end I was more interested in how they’d “save the day” than how they would live happily ever after.
Overall, I wanted to love this book. I was enticed by the premise and themes that were summarized. I think it just didn’t hit on any of the topics I really wanted. I was halfway through the book and contemplated dropping it just out of disinterest, but decided to see it through to the end. I had a middling experience for a majority of it.