The monster fights go on way too long and the narration doesn’t help it at all. At that point in the novel, neither Mia nor Tric had done anything to get me to care about them as characters, and their repartee is not nearly as witty and charming as it’s evidently meant to be. You’d think running from monsters towards a murder church might be at least kind of interesting, but you would be wrong.
Mia and Tric, another important character, make their way across a dangerous desert to the Red Church, chased by monsters. The opening chapter has some interesting things going on, stylistically, but after that… yikes. If I’ve read another book that starts as badly, it’s been long enough that I don’t remember it.
But let me tell you: Nevernight needed those one hundred freebie pages. Maybe it’s not the best rule, but it’s how I operate. Usually at that point I’ll finish it regardless because once I’ve sunk 100 pages into a book, I’d rather finish it and be able to claim I’ve read it (I’ve actually only DNF’d one book that I can remember). I have a strict rule about reading: I have to read 100 pages of a book before I decide whether or not I’m going to finish it.
She joins a group of thirty-some hardened acolytes at the church and is informed that only four of them will achieve their goal to become Blades. In order to obtain the skills necessary to kill these men, though, Mia must become a Blade, a sanctified assassin for the Red Church and its deity, the Lady of Blessed Murder (the blasphemous sister of the officially recognized sun god). Long ago, Mia swore to revenge herself on the important men who executed her father and sent her mother and brother to a miserable prison. Nevernight’s cover is well done: both the image and the novel itself are interesting, compelling, creepy, and violent. They say don’t judge a book by its cover, but if the cover is well done, there’s no reason not to. It’s intriguing, certainly, but nightmarish. I think I must have seen Nevernight on an online list somewhere, probably one with small pictures, because I suspect I wouldn’t have read it if I’d seen the cover artwork up close and personal.
I don’t know how Nevernight ended up on that list in the first place, as I don’t generally read dark or adult fantasy and while I have read Kristoff’s work in the past (specifically, I read Illuminae), his name on the cover of a book is not necessarily an incentive to pick it up. I got Nevernight by Jay Kristoff from the library because I picked a few books from my goodreads to-read list at random.
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