I was given an ARC by the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.
Reign of Shadows was a surprisingly easy read for a fantasy book. I didn’t exactly fly through it but it was a quick read nonetheless. I really liked the pacing of the book as well. The romance of this book is just one of my favorite things ever! It really made me feel the tension and the feels between Luna and Fowler, and this is the type of romance that I really enjoy. It’s intense, and it just made me feel so much in general. I really enjoyed the story, but I think this is the type of book that if you don’t think about anything much, you will really enjoy it. However, once I thought about what to write for this review, I just couldn’t get past the fact that it was abruptly stopped and that there wasn’t much world building.
Okay, so this book is full-length but the thing is it felt abruptly stopped at a weird point. I thought that the ending was just the end of one chapter, so I was surprised to find out that it was already the end of the book. I know this is a series, but it doesn’t feel like a cliff-hanger as much as an unfinished book that has more chapters to come. This is exactly what I felt after I finished reading Never, Never: Part One, which is why I liken this to part one of a book.
I also didn’t like how there was so little background about the world and the characters. Yes, there were some things revealed, and maybe it’s the author’s plan to reveal more things towards the next books in the series, but I still felt like I know so little about the world and the situation the characters are in. For instance, I don’t get the origin of the creatures (sorry, I forgot what they’re called) in the book, and I just felt like there could have been more explanation for them. Also, not much was revealed about the lives of Luna and Fowler, although there was an interesting bomb dropped towards the end (which I really loved).