Book Review: Nevernight (The Nevernight Chronicles #1)

About the Book:
Title: Nevernight (The Nevernight Chronicles #1)
Author: Jay Kristoff
Pub. Date: Aug. 9, 2016
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Pages: 448 
Rating: 1/5 stars

Synopsis:

In a land where three suns almost never set, a fledgling killer joins a school of assassins, seeking vengeance against the powers who destroyed her family.

Daughter of an executed traitor, Mia Corvere is barely able to escape her father’s failed rebellion with her life. Alone and friendless, she hides in a city built from the bones of a dead god, hunted by the Senate and her father’s former comrades. But her gift for speaking with the shadows leads her to the door of a retired killer, and a future she never imagined.

Now, Mia is apprenticed to the deadliest flock of assassins in the entire Republic—the Red Church. If she bests her fellow students in contests of steel, poison and the subtle arts, she’ll be inducted among the Blades of the Lady of Blessed Murder, and one step closer to the vengeance she desires. But a killer is loose within the Church’s halls, the bloody secrets of Mia’s past return to haunt her, and a plot to bring down the entire congregation is unfolding in the shadows she so loves.

Will she even survive to initiation, let alone have her revenge?

Review:

Unpopular opinion time...I debated on whether or not to write a review for this book because 1) I hate writing bad reviews, and 2) I ended up DNF'ing it at 75% (much too late in my opinion) so I can't really say how the entire book was. But I did want to get my opinion out there and tell you why I didn't like it so much. Let me start by saying, it's very rare that I actually give a book 1 star. I usually give most books the benefit of the doubt and even if I didn't like it at all, I end up giving it 2 stars because at the end of the day...well, it wasn't that bad (I know, I know...I'm too nice, sue me haha). But with Nevernight, I literally spent every minute dreading having to read the next page (let alone the rest of the book). I was counting down the minutes until I could just be done with reading the book so I could move onto something that was somewhat more enjoyable, like I don't know, a textbook maybe? I would even go as far to say that Nevernight was my own nightmare. 

Judge away, but this book made me so bored, and I found myself re-reading the synopsis and 5 star reviews on different sites to remind myself why I actually wanted to read this book in the first place. The writing style is definitely not for me (I completely own up to that). It's not that it's bad, but I couldn't get into it at all. It's extremely dense and the story is bogged down with an overuse of descriptions, metaphors, similes, you name it. There were countless times I literally had to re-read the same paragraph 5 times because I had absolutely no idea what was going on. And please don't even get me started on the eye-roll inducing descriptions that I couldn't even suppress a sigh (or laugh) after reading the sentence. Some examples for your enjoyment: 

"Mia sighed. Took her temper by the earlobe and pulled it to heel." or 

"Something had followed her from that place. The place above the music where her father died. Something hungry. A blind, grub consciousness, dreaming of shoulders crowned with translucent wings. And she, who would gift them."

The plot itself is convoluted and is way over done. It's hard to follow, and I quickly lost interest. Scenes go on and on for pages and half the time wasn't memorable enough for me to even remember what was going on at the beginning of the scene. Not only that, but EVERYTHING.IS.SO.DRAMATIC! Even the most benign aspects of the story are overwrought with drama and nonsense. 

I wish this was better, I really do. But I can't bring myself to recommend this book in any way. Hey, if you like description upon description...this book is for you! If you like a bogged down story with a crap-ton of details that make you lose sight of what the story is actually about, then pick it up. Unfortunately, this was not for me.

Happy reading :)

~Cassie