A review by katyanaish
Chase the Dark by Annette Marie

3.0

So ... I had no idea this book was YA when I started, and being totally upfront here: YA is not my thing AT ALL. That's not to say that all of it is bad, but when I do take a stab at YA, 90% of it is just not my cuppa. Overly angsty melodrama and TSTL crap are my big buttons in stories, and YA tends to be saturated with it. This one definitely is. Honestly, I knew in the first chapter - when the heroine explains that she's splitting time between school and training - that I should just back away. But I have a reaaaaaaaaally hard time quitting books / series that I've started. Some part of me just HAS to know the ending once I've started a story - there are very, very, very few books on my DNF list. For my own self-preservation, I wish I was better about that.

That said, I didn't hate this. I'm giving it 2.5 stars.

As always, I'm curious about the world, the backstory, etc. I just really struggle with some of the melodramatic sections. Fortunately, while there are a couple TSTL moments -

Spoiler

and why in fuck is she carrying that stone on her, rather than hiding it?!

- they don't dominate the story. That said, I don't particularly like any of the characters. Piper and Lyre are okay. Ash has his great moments, and his horrible moments. Her parents are both psychotic assholes with their own agendas and seem like they give zero fucks about her. All the other characters are 2-dimensional and generally evil... and the few that seem like they maybe aren't evil are only because we haven't yet learned enough about them to see their evil agenda, probably.

I'm going to poke at the next one, and see if it gets its shit together. This is because, as I stated above, I have a horribly hard time walking away from a story without knowing the ending. But meh. My expectations are really low.