Evenfall Fell Short

I was recently given the opportunity to read Evenfall by Gaja and Boris Kos (thank you Netgalley for the ARC).  While I thought the concept of the book was good, it sadly did not live up to expectations.  Evenfall did have to follow some of the most amazing books I read this year; even still, it was just okay.

After I was about 25% of the way through the book and I still wasn’t feeling this book, I tried to figure out why this book just didn’t mesh with me.  I think the biggest problem was that there was a lot of infodumping.  Ember, our heroine, was confused and was trying to figure out what was going on.  Her new friend Ada was trying to help her understand, but there was a lot of explanation and not much action.  For a lot of the book, there wasn’t a lot of dialogue either.  There were descriptions of them eating breakfast, traveling to Ada’s house, and a little bit of hiding, but there wasn’t a lot going on.

The action did pick up some in the second half, when Ember’s interactions with the “bad guy”, the Crescent Prince, pick up in earnest.  The last 20% of the book was actually fairly good.  Still, I thought there was a love interest that sparked a little too quickly in the last bit (Ember and another person declared their love to each other after knowing each other for probably less than a week).

Despite all of the explaining that was going on, there were times when the character seemed to know things that she shouldn’t have.  I hope that these are fixed before the finished product comes out, but there were two occasions where Ember names a character they were going to meet when we hadn’t been introduced to them previously.

On a positive note, the magic systems and the storyline were interesting and complex.  I started to feel like I was getting to know Ember by the end of the book.  I could also feel for her and the fact that she didn’t want to be used as somebody else’s pawn.  There were a lot of interesting aspects to the world here.

Considering that the action did pick up towards the end of the book, I might think about reading the sequel.  It’s not something I’d put at the top of my TBR, but there is a part of me that wants to see this world put back together.