The Fell of Dark

This was SO good! The amount of plot twists, the historical references, everything is just *kisses fingers* great! I love it. It was so sexy, the resolve of the love triangle was just GREAT and I love everything about it. I love the characters, the setting, and although I usually like my books either funny or serious, this was an amazing mixture of both. I also think the author did an amazing job of representing a teenage. I wouldn't change a single thing about this. It's so good! Both Gunnar and Jude are amazing, the tension between the three characters is palpable! And Hope and Adriana are so cute! Amazing.

A plus for the almost polyamory because is cool. Also, it was nice to read about old fashioned vampires who hate sunlight and crosses and the poor guy being possessed having horny visions lol

I'm as excited about the comeback of vampire YA books as anyone, and a gay YA vampire book seemed right up my alley. Unfortunately, this one kind of missed the mark for me. Let's start out with the things I did like! I liked how realistic everything was--considering all the paranormal elements. The teenage characters acted like teenagers, and their friendships/relationships were incredibly true to life. I think Caleb Roehrig does a really good job of writing messy, flawed, realistic teenage characters, and I absolutely loved that. I also enjoyed the rep in this; I cannot speak to its accuracy, since I am not a gay guy, but as a lesbian, I'm happy whenever I see ownvoices queer rep. Unfortunately, the realistic portrayal of the teenage characters, particularly the main character, was also a shortcoming of the book. Auggie is a sort of "chosen one" who is slowly being taken over by a sinister force that could lead to the destruction of humanity and a new age of vampire superiority. Sounds badass, right? The problem is, all these secret societies come out of the woodwork to try to take advantage of the rising evil. Virtually all important information is given to Auggie in paragraphs-long info dumps from characters that are part of aforementioned secret societies and are way cooler than Auggie. He just doesn't really do anything until pretty late in the game, which as I mentioned, seems accurate to a real teenager, but doesn't make for a very interesting reading experience. I can't help but feel like this book would be more compelling if it were told from the perspective of literally any other character. Normally I love and respect the Chosen One trope because it's so prolific for a reason, but in this instance, it was a swing and miss for me. As I said, the characters are really good and I think if they had been placed in a traditional YA contemporary, I would have liked this book much more. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a copy free for review. All opinions are my own.