Court of Nightfall

It’s great storytelling at its finest. I was invested in the characters and fully immersed in their worlds. Although the some characters were not technically human, they were relatable. Then again pain has a way of making kindred spirits out of strangers. Good read, would recommend!!

This book started out very interesting to me, with (as many previous reviewers say) the book convincingly written as from the perspective of a child and a teen. For me a sudden veer ruined the book and after that I found myself bothered by more and more other things about the writing.

More details follow *with light spoilers*: For me the sudden veer that I found completely implausible was how Scarlett suddenly became able to see colors and once she could, was suddenly able to identify every color she saw, down to specific hues such as “oak” and “sapphire.” I found this was way beyond my ability to suspend disbelief and further, that the authors seemed to never have considered what a disability like colorblindness would actually be like for the disabled person. At first I thought that maybe there would be something about the vision test taken just before this that would explain what had happened, but in the end all the reader learned was that Scarlett had passed the test despite still having been colorblind at the time, which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and made me even more annoyed. Plus her AI had only been depicted describing basic colors such as yellow and blue, so that also wasn’t an explanation. After this I started noticing other things that bothered me about the writing, like Scarlett referencing things she only learned about a page or two later (I suspect these were caused by editing errors - moving the text around to edit without realizing they had messed up the order). Plus I found the way the book didn’t reveal until a good way through that there were “serfs” in this world and the implication through lack of mentioning it that everyone else was okay with that, even the characters who generally espoused equality, really bothersome as well.

I get that this is a really popular book and I was hoping to enjoy this book and this series, but in the end the completely unrealistic way it depicted Scarlett’s sudden ability to identify colors meant that it wasn’t for me.

Great story! Love the characters and really good development. So easy to love them all and be sad and emotion. You can feel the anger and also the love. Ready to read the next one!