Wednesday, July 14, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Down Comes the Night by Allison Saft

 

Down Comes the Night is a YA Fantasy Novel from author Allison Saft.  I'm going to admit, I'm not particularly sure what drew me to it, but I reserved it from my local e-library a long time ago, and it came in on only a 14 day loan, forcing me to read it rather quickly.  Reading books on a hunch can sometimes pay off big, even if it often results in wading through a book that is merely mediocre.  

Unfortunately, Down Comes the Night really isn't one of those gems, but is instead a merely serviceable and predictable piece of YA fantasy.  Readers will predict a number of twists straight from the outset, such as who really is the antagonist and how characters are going to develop, and the story rarely really deviates from that path.  Still some of those beats - enemies to lovers, only one bed, healing your enemy, etc. - are pretty classic tropes for a reason, and the book is perfectly fine as a result, even if some last act developments don't really work.  

------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------
Wren Southerland can't help herself.  She may be Danu's best healer - magically or otherwise - and she may be the bastard niece of the Queen...but she can't help but feel compassion for almost anyone she sees hurt.  Such compassion is dangerous with Danu on the verge of war with its sworn enemy, the neighboring country of Vesria, with soldiers with magical abilities disappearing on both sides, and with Danu's Queen, Wren's aunt, hating Wren for her weakness with a passion.  Wren's commander Una - both Wren's best friend and the girl she desperately loves - tries to make her more ruthless....but in one more moment of weakness, she heals an enemy spy, allowing him to get away.  And so Wren finds herself in disgrace and isolated in misery.  

Until a letter comes from the neutral third country of Cernos, a country without magic, asking Wren to help an eclectic noble with a mysterious disease.  The noble promises Wren that if she helps, he will throw his wealthy support behind Danu, which could turn the tide in the coming war, and so Wren risks everything - including her good name - to answer the call.  But what Wren finds in Cernos is a mansion in ill repair, a noble lord who acts incredibly strange and limits her movements strictly and bizarrely, and a patient who happens to be Hal Cavendish, a notorious noble soldier from Vesria, the man she's had nightmares about for years.  

A more ruthless woman would take the chance to just kill the patient and run home in triumph, but Wren is not that woman.  And soon that compassion will lead Wren to realize that something is very very wrong in the mansion, and that not all is as it seems...and that only by teaming with Hal may she have a chance of figuring it all out....
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Down Comes the Night is a pretty standard young adult romantic fantasy.  You have a protagonist from a kingdom with magical powers (healing - the classical good girl powers) who is deep with compassion and empathy and you have a clear love interest from a rival kingdom who she has reason to hate from his past actions and reputation, thrown together by fate.  Slowly they realize that their actions have to be aligned, as what is happening in the mystery involves both their kingdoms and of course they fall in love....along with certain classic plot tropes such as them getting magically tied together so they feel each other's thoughts, an only one bed moment, the moment where one attempts to betray the other only for the betrayed one to save the other....etc.  

Still, these tropes are tropes for a reason, in that they make the foundation of a solid story, which this certainly is.  Wren and Hal both work as characters, particularly Wren, from whose eyes we see the story, as the girl who wishes to simply be loved for who she is by the people she cares about - the girl she loves (Wren is bi) Una and her aunt the Queen, who seems to see her as a disgrace just for her birth.  Wren wants merely to be respected for her compassion and has to learn to assert herself, to show she knows her worth isn't tied to being useful to a war effort, and Hal pushes her in that direction.  Hal meanwhile is trying to repent and deal with his horrifying past actions, and trying to make up for allowing himself to be so used, just as much as Wren is trying to show she can be.  It makes them work together thematically and they have solid chemistry, even if it's not the most romantic thing I've read.  

All this is in service of a plot that is so formulaic as to be almost hilariously predictable for the first 80%.  You will guess immediately who the real antagonist of the story is, who is responsible for the mysterious disappearances and why, and what is going on in the mysterious locked off East Wing of the mansion (there's an attempt at sort of a gothic fantasy atmosphere at times, but it doesn't really quite work since the answers are so so obvious).  Still, Saft makes it work fine, and the book isn't long enough for the predictability to become too grating, since answers are never that far away - even if that makes aspects of the ending, especially one character taking a surprising turn, feel kind of abrupt and not developed at all.  

In short, Down Comes the Night is a fine romantic YA fantasy book, but nothing more than that, and certainly nothing most readers won't have read before - either in the romantic sense or the fantasy sense or even the thematic sense ("you are worth more than what you can do" is for good reason a common theme these days).  Not a bad book to read, but not one I'd heavily recommend you pick up over many many others.  

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