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A review by mdpenguin
Nigh: Book 1 by Marie Bilodeau
3.0
I'm being generous with the third star: it's somewhere between a two and a three. This isn't something that I'd have read while it was being serialized, but if it were then I'd have stopped with this book. I actually have the omnibus edition so I'll finish the whole thing off, but I'm rating them as I go along. It's not that this is bad, it's just that I don't really find the characters that believable or interesting. There's enough development of the main character and her relationships to the other characters that it works, but Al just doesn't seem that realistic to me. And the story is mostly just chaos through this book. The descriptions of that chaos are strong but it mostly doesn't make sense at this point. There are definitely places it can go, but I really would have needed more of a hint as to what's going on to hold my attention. As things develop in the later books I may revise my opinions.
*Addendum* Having finished the five books, I think that Bilodeau is great at painting imagery with words, be it horrific, magical, or beautiful. And she did come up with a nice story. She just didn't do a good enough job of building the world or the people in it to really make me care. Relationships and characters that are explained at the beginning seemed flat to me. I was able to get into the relationships that are built within the novel with new characters, but it took until book 3 for me to find the world interesting and book 4 was the first where I actually cared about the people. The overall novel -- all five books together -- comes out as three stars because of the strength of the last two books (though I found the ending a little flat). It could have been so much more, but there was enough good in the last bit of it to make the time invested in the first two books worth it.
*Addendum* Having finished the five books, I think that Bilodeau is great at painting imagery with words, be it horrific, magical, or beautiful. And she did come up with a nice story. She just didn't do a good enough job of building the world or the people in it to really make me care. Relationships and characters that are explained at the beginning seemed flat to me. I was able to get into the relationships that are built within the novel with new characters, but it took until book 3 for me to find the world interesting and book 4 was the first where I actually cared about the people. The overall novel -- all five books together -- comes out as three stars because of the strength of the last two books (though I found the ending a little flat). It could have been so much more, but there was enough good in the last bit of it to make the time invested in the first two books worth it.