Rating: 4.25
Trigger Warnings: blood, violence
About the Book:
Author: Rachel Gillig
Published: September 27th, 2022
Genre: Fantasy
Description:
Elspeth needs a monster. The monster might be her.
Elspeth Spindle needs more than luck to stay safe in the eerie, mist-locked kingdom of Blunder—she needs a monster. She calls him the Nightmare, an ancient, mercurial spirit trapped in her head. He protects her. He keeps her secrets.
But nothing comes for free, especially magic.
When Elspeth meets a mysterious highwayman on the forest road, her life takes a drastic turn. Thrust into a world of shadow and deception, she joins a dangerous quest to cure Blunder from the dark magic infecting it. And the highwayman? He just so happens to be the King’s nephew, Captain of the most dangerous men in Blunder…and guilty of high treason.
Together they must gather twelve Providence Cards—the keys to the cure. But as the stakes heighten and their undeniable attraction intensifies, Elspeth is forced to face her darkest secret yet: the Nightmare is slowly taking over her mind. And she might not be able to stop him.
Review:
My journey with One Dark Window begins with a personal recommendation from one of my cousins who is also an avid reader. Her description of the book’s premise as well as her account of how much she had enjoyed the full duology, inspired me to read the first book so much so that I DNF’d my then-current-read in favour of starting it immediately. Though the majority of my book recommendations (the ones that fill up my never-ending TBR) typically come from articles from sites such as Goodreads or the wide range of videos available on BookTok, this one was an outlier in that sense, a fact that I found I ended up appreciating. Sometimes, these typical ways of finding book recs can give away too much information about the book ahead of reading. Though I typically don’t mind this, it was nice to have a good old-fashioned recommendation from someone whose taste in books I genuinely trust.
Although I had heard her praise about this book, I can’t lie and say that I was immediately hooked by it. The beginning of the story which, typical of the genre, starts with world-building had me feeling slightly bored/confused. In particular, I found that the amount of characters and magical descriptions was a tad overwhelming. However, there are definitely fantasy books out there (Tolkien, I’m looking at you) that contain way more flowery and dense descriptions so if you don't mind this you may rate it higher than I did. I simply thought that because of the easy flow of the writing style, the world-building would create less of a lull in the overall pace of the book’s beginning.
About a quarter or third ways through the book, I started to really enjoy my reading experience. It was almost as if the world-building needed to get out of the way first because after that point I was absolutely head-over-heels in love with the intriguing plot, its complex characters, and the incredibly unique magic system. For context, I finished this book within a week (which is quite fast for me). Around this point in the story as well, I found that I really started to enjoy the romantic subplot. The characters grew closer quicker than they would if it was a more traditional slow-burn, often common in fantasy, but not too fast that it felt unnatural! Plus, I could clearly feel the heat between them from the moment they met though it also didn’t feel forced at all.
Stay tuned for my review of the second book!
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