Down Comes the Night by Allison SaftMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
War had made orphans of them all.
Down Comes the Night is a standalone story marketed as young adult, fantasy, romance, and Gothic. I don't often venture into young adult but I was surprised when there was a sex scene in the last ten percent of the story, but maybe this isn't unheard of. The characters are around nineteen which, with the overall tone, made me think this fit more in New Adult, just less sex than I'm used to seeing in that sub-genre. With our characters having magic abilities, Wren, who is our main protagonist, can heal and Hal, the enemy-to-lover, can kill with his eyes, the fantasy element was there. The world building gives us three countries, Danu, Vesria, and Cenos, with Danu and Vesria currently in a truce after warring for centuries. This is why the military ranks are full of young adults, as there has been mass casualties on both sides. The war seems to be about religious differences and power struggle between the magic empires. Cenos has remained neutral as their citizens don't have magic abilities.
“It’s uncomfortable, yes, to be so aware of you.” Good, she wanted to say.
Suffer with me.
The story is told from Wren's point of view and she is the illegitimate daughter of the queen of Danu's sister. With her mother and father both dead, Wren is sent to a holy cloister until she is twelve years old and then sent to the military academy to train in the medical corps as her magic heals. There she meets Una, and with a little hero worship in their relationship from Wren, they become friends and eventually have one night together before Una declares it can never happen again because she is Wren's superordinate in the military. When three soldiers of Danu who were patrolling the border between Danu and Vesria go missing, one who happens to be Wren's friend, the queen sends Una and Wren to investigate. Wren's sense of mercy allows a lead to escape and she ends up getting punished by the queen and sent back to the holy cloisters, feeling let down by Una. There she receives a letter from Lord Alistair Lowry III, a noble in Cenos, asking her to come help cure a servant and use her status as an almost royal to work as a liaison between their countries as he wants Cenos to side with Danu and defeat Versia. Wren, wanting to finally prove her worth, goes against the queen and Una and leaves to help the servant.
Something was undeniably rotten in Colwick Hall.
Wren arrives in Cenos, around the twenty percent mark, is where the Gothic tone creeps in more as Lowry lives in a dark and forbidding castle that is rumored to be haunted. It started off with Gothic promise but I'm not sure it was fully sustained but if this is written for young adult minds, then the howling and mystery of the closed off East wing could hit the mark for them. When Wren goes to heal the servant, she discovers that the servant is in fact Hal Cavendish, The Reaper of Vesria, a soldier that has killed thousands of her country brethren and supposedly in line to become the ruler of Vesria. While at Colwick Hall, Wren discovers that Hal's sickness and Lowry are not all they seem and she finds herself growing to care for Hal as she battles the desire to deliver Hal to the queen and become a hero in the queen and her country's eyes.
But it would never be simple. He was Vesrian, and she was Danubian.
I thought around the fifty percent mark, when Wren finally begins to trust Hal as he says that he is also investigating disappearances but of Vesria soldiers, that the pace started to slow down. The newness of the world ebbed and I started to look for more depth behind certain elements, the queen's obsession of clocks, the queen herself, the war, Severance (taking away someone's magic), and world itself. Wren trying to figure out what exactly is going with Lowry had her going in circles for too long and then Wren and Hal running from the castle felt needless and pointless to the overall plot. At first, the story felt set in some kind of fantasy medieval time but when it moves to Cenos, it switches to Victorian, which with Cenos supposed to be more technologically advanced, I guess could make sense but really it just made the fantasy and Gothic elements not mesh right and neither ended up feeling developed fully.
I believe you, he’d said, with more trust and affection than she thought she’d ever deserve. Now she had to believe in herself.
The author's messaging was clear, endless wars cause horrible suffering, the lies from leaders at the top usually have self-serving purposes, and mercy and caring are not weaknesses. Wren and Hal getting to know one another and dispelling rumors and lies about each other, clearly built up their friendship. Their attraction had sweet moments that I thought fit into young adult but their physicality sometimes leaned into New Adult for me. The messaging was good but I thought it got lost in some slow pacing that could have been trimmed up. As fantasy novels usually come in trilogies though, Down Comes the Night does deliver a good story in a one-stop.
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