A review by imskylow
Dark Rise by C.S. Pacat

adventurous emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

Wtf is this even? I was confused the entire time through this book. The only reason I didn’t DNF it was because of my yearly reading goal. The pacing and passage of time in this book is positively bizarre. The characters feel half written and I don’t understand any of their motivations or actions.  At no point in this book did I have an inkling about what might happen next. It felt like an everlasting prologue. I felt like I was told to care about characters I hardly knew. I was so detached through this entire thing. There was a lack of dialogue and a lot of telling rather than showing. Additionally, some scenes were filled in later after the fact like “oh yeah and that happened back when we were doing this”. Relationships were established and told to be very deep even though, as readers, we get not evidence of it. Additionally, the conflict was generic and bland with no complexity. It was all a fight of good versus evil, dark versus light, and they were referred as such. What is this, alternate universe Star Wars? It was so overly simplistic that it became confusing as to why anyone was doing anything at all. It was seriously a struggle to finish.
AND EVEN WITH ALL THIS, because I am so starved for gay fantasy, the .3 seconds of homoetrotic tension between Will and James had me questioning if I should read the next book.