Name: Down Comes the Night
Author: Allison Saft
Publisher: Wednesday Books
Date published: March 2021
Genre: Fiction, young adult, fantasy, romance, gothic, mystery
Pages: 400
Rating: 4/5
He saw the darkness in her magic. She saw the magic in his darkness.
Wren Southerland’s reckless use of magic has cost her everything: she’s been dismissed from the Queen’s Guard and separated from her best friend - the girl she loves. So when a letter arrives from a reclusive lord, asking Wren to come to his estate, Colwick Hall, to cure his servant from a mysterious illness, she seizes her chance to redeem herself.
The mansion is crumbling, icy winds haunt the caved-in halls, and her eccentric host forbids her from leaving her room after dark. Worse, Wren’s patient isn’t a servant at all but Hal Cavendish, the infamous Reaper of Vesria and her kingdom’s sworn enemy. Hal also came to Colwick Hall for redemption, but the secrets in the estate may lead to both of their deaths.
With sinister forces at work, Wren and Hal realize they’ll have to join together if they have any hope of saving their kingdoms. But as Wren circles closer to the nefarious truth behind Hal’s illness, they realize they have no escape from the monsters within the mansion. All they have is each other, and a startling desire that could be their downfall.
- From Goodreads.
The author built a very interesting world to set this book in. It felt very atmospheric and every scene was described in such detail that it really came alive on the page. I could really imagine everything the main character described and all the different places she visited. The best place of course was Colwick Hall, I really felt how haunted and cold the mansion seemed to the characters and how unsafe they felt there.
I really liked the relationship between the main character and her love interest, I think they had such an interesting dynamic and I really liked how things slowly built between them. I thought that it was good that Wren was allowed to feel emotional and Hal made sure she knew that and did not make her feel weak for feeling anything, and he really appreciated her kindness. Not a lot of books have this because in fantasy worlds where there is war or other difficult things to face, characters are often made to feel like their kindness or other "soft" emotions will make them weak in a tough world and the idea that acts of kindness could actually help is dismissed as unrealistic, but Wren was allowed to be kind and emotional and make things right in the end and help change things with her kindness and without loosing her emotional side. This idea and theme was not always done perfectly throughout the book, but mostly I really liked it and was glad it was included.
Although I enjoyed the plot and thought it was captivating to follow the mystery through to the end, I think it could have been made into a more concise story. Towards the end it felt like the plot was going back and forth a few times, making the same point a couple of times over, which I felt was down to the main character being indecisive and unsure when it really felt like she should have already come to a decision or realistion about certain things. This led to it feeling like the story could have wrapped up a little sooner, and while I did enjoy how the story ended and what happened in the final few scenes, I think the impact was lost slightly because it felt like the story had been stretched out for the sake of adding a little more angst.
Overall, I did really like this book, I thought it had an intriguing mystery, atmospheric setting, well written characters and a compelling romance. I would recommend it if you liked Sorcery of Thorns by Margaret Rogerson or The Wolf and the Woodsman by Ava Reid.
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