Scan barcode
A review by alicechris
A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon
4.5
This was so good! The worldbuilding is phenomenal (as it is in Priory) and despite Shannon juggling four perspectives throughout the book I was invested in all of them. I was really impressed by the sense of time passing through the book without a loss of stakes or momentum.
I've knocked a half star off because it took me so long to get through the first part of the book, and because I think the whole book is maybe longer than it needs to be. The switching between perspectives so frequently at the start just left me confused and I would have preferred to have longer chunks with each narrator. By the third part, Shannon had me deeply invested, but I would have finished the book a lot faster if that had come earlier.
It's also worth saying that the LGBTQ+ representation in this book is just so good - high fantasy is often off-putting to me as its major works are just so male, and the matter of fact way Shannon writes about queerness in a fantasy setting will stay with me (Wulf and Thrit's romance maybe could have done with more developing though? ).
I've knocked a half star off because it took me so long to get through the first part of the book, and because I think the whole book is maybe longer than it needs to be. The switching between perspectives so frequently at the start just left me confused and I would have preferred to have longer chunks with each narrator. By the third part, Shannon had me deeply invested, but I would have finished the book a lot faster if that had come earlier.
It's also worth saying that the LGBTQ+ representation in this book is just so good - high fantasy is often off-putting to me as its major works are just so male, and the matter of fact way Shannon writes about queerness in a fantasy setting will stay with me (