mo_1634 's review for:

A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon

3.0

adventurous dark emotional hopeful reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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The Berethnet tragedy continues to haunt my thoughts. A day of fallen night kept theme and feel very well with its "sequel", and Shannon's fantasy writing still does a very good job at scratching that itch for a rich foreign world with equal focus on individual trials and wide scale political ventures. This time however we took a lot more special focus on romantic relationships, and Shannon showed a wide variety of romance and it's interactions with the world which kept everything very interconnected and plot relevant. However this, like The Priory of the Orange Tree, is also where the book suffered for me. I think both still would have benefited from having been a series instead of one large novel. While Shannon gives us the bullet points of individual relationships, there is just SO much going on that we cannot take any special attention to them except in a paragraph or two, more "tell" than "show" simply for the lack of time for development. While the large political and widescape nature of the plot is a part I enjoy, I think the politics and the individual relationships are equally sacrificed when trying to squish them into 800 pages. In all, ADoFN is a very entertaining fantasy story and it's examinations of its own political landscape through its individual characters gives heart breaking stories and tragedies. The hope for the future we have from TPotOT is no match for the present devestation, making it all the more tragic, which I thoroughly enjoy.