Promise of Darkness (Dark Court Rising Book 1)

I enjoyed this book but did find it very slow moving (takes a long time to build up to twists so although they’re good twists they’re blindingly obvious by the time we get there). I skim read some of the ‘info dump’ sections but the rest of intriguing and well written. I feel bad not giving it more stars but...My main problem was how similar it felt to Sarah Maas’ A Court of Mist and Fury. Many of the characters feel similar, the curse feels similar, the city she’s whisked off to is even called Valerian, City of Dreams, instead of Velaris, home to the Court of Dreams. I wasn’t sure if these similarities were supposed to be flattering or were subconscious on the author’s part, but they left me feeling like I was reading ACOTAR fanfic instead of an original novel. Nothing wrong with fanfic but this felt a bit uncomfortable.Anyway it’s well written with genuine sexual tension, it’s just a shame the author didn’t edit out the similarities to Maas’ work.

When I read it was a Hades & Persephone re-telling, I was all in. I love Greek mythology and wanted to see the twists the author put on it.Not to spoil the story for everyone, the heroine, Iskvien, is a tribute to the Prince of Evernight. She has to stay with him for three months, spy on him for her mother, the Queen of Thorns.After these three months are over, she is to return to her mother's kindgom, where she never really knew happiness and the only person she ever loved, her sister, had turned her back on her. Iskvien does everything to get on her mother's good side, to be as accomplished and praised as her sister, but her mother seems to loathe her and Iskvien doesn't know why.She doesn't know that it has to do with a certain prince and a curse and a heartbreaking love story. She doesn't know that she's running out of time to save a person she didn't even know she loved.I hope this piqued the interest of anyone in doubt of reading this book. It's good, even with a few grammatical errors - the author would switch from 1st person narrative to 3rd. If you're not bothered by that and want a great love story with some angst, give it a try. I'm really looking forward to book two.4.5 stars.

I gave this book a fair chance - I managed to read through almost 70% of it and I don't want to be unkind as I am not familiar with the author's other works. Unfortunately, this book feels as a blatant copy of ACOTAR, but without the imaginative and rich writing of Sarah J. Maas and the great plot and grittines.The characters are flat and boring, without any development and some of them are down right pointless and introduced without any reason. The mystery is nonexistent - too many hints dropped too many times, too clumsily. The twists were entirely predictable, as some of them were hinted at very poorly - for example, an entire, otherwise meaningless dialogue, discussing Hint A.The dialogues themselves were very flat, unimaginative and often times, cringy. They didn't serve purpose to reveal the inner workings of the characters or to progress the story, they felt more of a page filler.Very little was explained of the characters' motivation and often times, if stripped to its essence the motive would come down to something like "I didn't like that song you had composed" - what does that tell you about the character of a person?There were some confusions in the plot, descriptions were given, only to be changed later on. Words were used wrong - e.g. "yield to it" where it should have been "yield it". Some were not even the right words. Grammar was loose concept and the tenses could not figure themselves out.Overall this book has been a bit of an emotional roller coaster - I started off with little expectation, read the first couple of chapters and thought "this is not bad at all", to then be dropped straight back in "Plot holes" valley between " Grammar is dead" and "Words are meaningless" mountains. Maybe the author was trying something new and didn't quite get it right (as mentioned I'm not familiar with her style and writing) but I think it ends up being a rather poorly written, poorly thought out book with minimal to no editing. I'm afraid I won't be coming back to the series.

I started out not really vibing this. The prologue was a bit info-dumpy and the first few chapters weren't gripping me, but damn it if something about this story didn't force me to stick around for the ride.It's not perfect. Honestly, I think it needed another editing pass because there were a lot of typos and plot inconsistencies. I do tend to let this slide a little when I'm reading though, because I'm an editor and I know I hyper-focus on this stuff, and if the story is good I'm happy to overlook it. In this case, the story was just about good enough.Anyone who has read A Court of Mist and Fury will see the similarities with A Promise of Darkness. This isn't a bad thing – I bloomin' love ACOMAF. I'm a sucker for a 'dark' prince who's easy on the eyes. I think I wanted a bit more from the story, though. Or, rather, a bit less. There are a lot of plot points vying for attention and none of them really got the attention they needed. Personally, I would have just made this a fantasy romance and stripped out the fae war stuff going on in the background, but I won't say more on that because of spoilers.Ultimately, this was a quick, easy read and I did really like the romance. I thought it was a bit insta-lovey at first, but once you get into the plot you realise *why* it's that way and so I didn't mind it nearly as much. I might read the sequel, out of curiosity.