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ceruleanshelves's review against another edition
dark
emotional
funny
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
4.5
“I dragged myself out of Hell to you.”
this was the perfect book to start october off with dark academia, shadow-hiding creatures, eeriness, yearning romance, missing students, some YA horror and a little trip thru the dimensions.
lane is tired of being treated with kid gloves her whole life after losing her hearing as a kid, and she's burning to prove what she can be. she enrolls at the elusive but selective godbole university and quickly discovers she had good reason to be afraid of the dark growing up.
i love a gothic/e-girl fmc and i loved lane's tenacity. she navigates this new academic world of paranormal with determination and refuses to back down. i really connected w her sense of climbing uphill when you feel like everyone is constantly 10 steps ahead already.
“She wanted to be defined. Not by the silence between her ears or her fear of the dark, but by the sum of her achievements. Not by what she couldn't do, but by what she could.”
colton price is the golden boy of godbole, but he wasn't always this way. after a casual death and resurrection as a kid, he has a few secrets of his own - one of them being that he's had his eye on lane ever since he came back.
i lovedddddddd colton omg. off the bat he reminded me a bit of preston from a study in drowning, and the more we dived into his character the more he became the hero of the story for me. nothing gets me in a romance like a pathetically yearning man and colton has a phd in it.
“He couldn’t help it. He went where she led, like a paper kite on a string. He was hopelessly caught, twisted in her branches. His line tangled. His spine splintered. His sail all in tatters. There was no clean way to work himself free.”
i also really enjoyed the side characters, they all felt very specific to me and real. even hayes who doesn't have the biggest part stuck out as a type of person i could pin down in my real life circles.
i think this is the first book i've read with the leading character being Deaf, so it was a very new reading experience for me. it esp hits different in OwnVoices writing bc there's details that you just know as the reader are incredibly specific experiences for the writer.
the writing was very atmospheric and the setting was exactly what i wanted to get me into the spooky halloween season, the perfect marriage of dark academia and supernatural horror.
“Howe University looked like everything Septembers were meant to embody—like bricks and books and new beginnings. It smelled like it, too. Fresh-cut grass and petrichor, coffee grounds and vanillin and the faint, autumnal smack of sour apples.”
a magic school is of course so much fun, though the focus leans more into the mystery and romance which is fine, but i always love to get more into magic system and school details. i think in this case though knowing less worked from lane's perspective of being out of the loop when she arrived, as well as the Priory group really winging it.
“It was incredibly naive of Whitehall,” he said, confessing what he could, “to think we could pass freely between worlds and not expect something uninvited to follow us home.”
there is a tiny bit of gore and body horror, but at a very chill YA level and easy to skim over if needed. as someone who's a bit more queasy when it comes to that, i was totally fine with it.
my only complaint is i want more of everything! what i would give for an epilogue novella 😭
this was my first book by kelly andrew and it did not disappoint! i'm really excited to get into her other books now.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death
Moderate: Body horror and Blood
Minor: Ableism, Gore, Dementia, Grief, and Medical trauma
bibliomania_express's review against another edition
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Child death, Death, and Murder
Moderate: Body horror, Torture, Violence, Kidnapping, Grief, Medical trauma, Gaslighting, and Abandonment
Minor: Cancer, Toxic relationship, Dementia, and Car accident