Nevernight

In Nevernight, Jay Kristoff, known for his young adult series The Lotus Wars and The Illuminae Files, gives us a stunning new piece of dark storytelling for adults. Though the story follows Mia Corvere, a seventeen-year-old assassin-in-training, readers will find pages that run red with gore, merciless violence, and a few very sultry scenes. Mia is out to avenge her family’s murder. She sets out to train under the assassins of the Red Church, always accompanied by her shadow cat, Mr. Kindly. There she forms alliances, hones her skills, and is forced to face a memory that she’s kept deeply hidden.

The storytelling and world-building is rich and incredibly ornate—at times even a little overwrought with purple prose. The story is peppered with footnotes, and while some were hilarious tidbits of sarcastic genius, others disrupted the flow of the story with just too much information. The story is told in three parts, and it was the last of them that really shone. It brought everything together in an incredible and exciting finale, and will no doubt make even those readers that may have found the first parts a little slow-going desperate for the next book in The Nevernight Chronicles.