Night Shine

This book was phenomenal. It may have been a little slow to get into, but only after 50 pages I was invested, hooked and allotting all my free time to read it. Nothing is a character that held my heart and I wanted the best for her from the beginning. I haven't read a Tessa Gratton novel to my knowledge before but her writing style is easy and feels comfy. Highly recommended. 5/5. Can't wait to find the sequel.

I really wanted to love this book; the writing in the prologue chapter hooked me, and I love the idea of fantasy full of characters who are trans, queer, nb, etc. I wanted to love it. Night Shine is the story of Nothing, a girl who has been the companion to Prince Kirin Dark-Smile for almost as long as she can remember. When she discovers that Kirin has disappeared, possibly kidnapped, she sets out with one of Kirin's bodyguards, The Day The Sky Opened. to rescue him from The Sorceress Who Eats Girls. Along the way, Nothing, and the readers, learn more about how Kirin is The Prince Who Is Also a Maiden -- sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, sometimes neither. And when Nothing and The Day The Sky Opened arrive at the sorceress's fortress, they begin to find that the situation, and Nothing herself, is more complicated than any of them had realized. I had three problems with this book -- though I will acknowledge that it may work better for other people than it did for me. The first is that protagonist Nothing is so wholly devoted to Kirin that her character seems entirely constituted in relation to him. That gets more complicated around halfway through the book, but it was so dominant in the first half as to be grating as I read. The second is that as the plot develops, readers discover that characters have done horrible things that are presented as though we should be impressed by them, because they were done in the name of one character's love for another. And ... I found myself horrified, rather than impressed. These acts are not romantic. They're just dark; love isn't a justification. Finally, the other thing is that this book seems to be ... mostly a series of very poetic tableaux. They are very pretty - but after a while, they tire. It's like the film Labyrinth -- but if Labyrinth were mostly the iconic "You have no power over me", over and over. Maybe this will work better for other readers, and I liked Gratton's writing enough to be intrigued, and want to check out her other stuff. Alas, this just didn't work for me.