i received a copy of a day of fallen night from bloomsbury au in exchange for an honest review.
star rating
a day of fallen night review
please don’t hate me for this review. as someone who loved priory of the orange tree, it pains me to rate a day of fallen night so low.
we’ll go straight in with the heavy stuff first:
my biggest issue with a day of fallen night is that things didn’t pick up until 350 pages into the book (that’s about 40%! where nothing happens!!). for contrast, priory of the orange tree didn’t pick up until about 250 pages in. both had slow starts but a day of fallen night was definitely dragged out longer.
i really struggled to like any of the characters in this book. while it took me a while to properly connect to anyone in priory, fallen night was significantly worse. of the characters (and there’s quite a few), i only really liked glorian. i liked her mother at the beginning, but she became boring and irritating the further in i read.
because of this, once the plot began to pick up, i really didn’t care what was happening to who. i didn’t care if someone died, as i didn’t like them in the first place.
again, comparing this to priory: the plot just wasn’t as strong. priory had so many good reveals in the second half that had be going “no way!” and “oh my god”. there was no such excitement in fallen night.
a day of fallen night, much like priory, was extremely slowly paced. this book took me over 3 weeks to finish. (for comparison, priory took me 2 weeks, and i was buddy reading it with a friend. i could’ve finished it much quicker but didn’t due to the buddy read). it was so unnecessarily tedious.
i guess that’s all the negative stuff i had to spew.
as for the positives, i fucking love the dragons! so many fantasy books these days don’t have any, but both priory and fallen night have plenty to fill that void.
as with priory, fallen night has lots of in-depth world building. there’s so much history and lore to learn, and shannon doesn’t skimp on the details.
i write this review with a heavy heart. i enjoyed priory a lot, and had high expectations. I’ve seen majority of the gr reviews are positive, do don’t let my opinion dissuade you. you might enjoy it more than i did! I’m in the minority with my thoughts here. if you liked priory, i still suggest trying it out.
2 Comments
I’m so sorry this didn’t live up to your expectations. Slow starts frustrate me too
i knew it was going to be slow based on the previous book, but damn, not THAT slow!