Tigest Girma

The highly anticipated Black vampire romantasy title of 2024! Perfect for fans of Leigh Bardugo and Chloe Gong.

Book 1

Immortal Dark

The atmosphere was intriguing with an interesting magic system. Obviously, I’m obsessed with how Black the characters are while still being diverse in other ways. The author is Ethiopian and found a way to incorporate her culture into the story in ways that I very much appreciate.

There is a sort of enemies to lovers subplot in this. I appreciate that it remained a subplot, and I love that it’s ACTUAL enemies — not just mild dislike for one another.

The beginning was so convoluted. I had access to this book in both audio and physical form. I started with audio and switched to physical because I was having a very hard time understanding what was even going on for the first couple of chapters. There were many passages that I had to re-read to comprehend.

Additionally, the story started to drag somewhere in the middle for me, and I took almost a week off from reading it because I was in such a slump. There were definitely parts that could’ve been shortened or changed to fix the pacing. Part of this pacing issue was the result of a plot change around the halfway point. We start off with a clear mission in the beginning, but it shifts into a different story by the end. (I would compare it to how the first half of ACOTAR was drastically different from the second half.)

Onto the characters. Our main character is Kidan, and while I enjoyed that she was the definition of morally grey, she was annoying and impulsive. She has a goal but is in her own way because of how hardheaded she is. Plus, her ideas and hatred of vampires stems from one of them doing something wrong, so she wants to kill them all. This seems very genocidal to me, and if we applied this to other groups, it would be… problematic. I couldn’t really align with her tunnel vision and found it hard to empathize with her at some parts because of this. Her focus was so narrow and filed by vengeance. Susenyos was fine as well. He wasn’t as volatile as Kidan and had an interesting enough backstory. At times, he was unnecessarily antagonistic, but I enjoyed him. The background characters truly meant nothing to me.

Overall, I wanted to fall in love with this book but I just “liked” it. I think I am interested enough to read the sequel whenever that comes out, but in general, there were just some parts that fell flat for me that I was really excited to explore. I still think this is a really good debut novel and can’t wait to see what else the author comes up with.

Nik ✨

Starting with what I enjoyed:

The atmosphere was intriguing with an interesting magic system. Obviously, I’m obsessed with how Black the characters are while still being diverse in other ways. The author is Ethiopian and found a way to incorporate her culture into the story in ways that I very much appreciate.

There is a sort of enemies to lovers subplot in this. I appreciate that it remained a subplot, and I love that it’s ACTUAL enemies — not just mild dislike for one another.

The parts I had issues with:

The beginning was so convoluted. I had access to this book in both audio and physical form. I started with audio and switched to physical because I was having a very hard time understanding what was even going on for the first couple of chapters. There were many passages that I had to re-read to comprehend.

Additionally, the story started to drag somewhere in the middle for me, and I took almost a week off from reading it because I was in such a slump. There were definitely parts that could’ve been shortened or changed to fix the pacing. Part of this pacing issue was the result of a plot change around the halfway point. We start off with a clear mission in the beginning, but it shifts into a different story by the end. (I would compare it to how the first half of ACOTAR was drastically different from the second half.)

Onto the characters. Our main character is Kidan, and while I enjoyed that she was the definition of morally grey, she was annoying and impulsive. She has a goal but is in her own way because of how hardheaded she is. Plus, her ideas and hatred of vampires stems from one of them doing something wrong, so she wants to kill them all. This seems very genocidal to me, and if we applied this to other groups, it would be… problematic. I couldn’t really align with her tunnel vision and found it hard to empathize with her at some parts because of this. Her focus was so narrow and filed by vengeance. Susenyos was fine as well. He wasn’t as volatile as Kidan and had an interesting enough backstory. At times, he was unnecessarily antagonistic, but I enjoyed him. The background characters truly meant nothing to me.

Overall, I wanted to fall in love with this book but I just “liked” it. I think I am interested enough to read the sequel whenever that comes out, but in general, there were just some parts that fell flat for me that I was really excited to explore. I still think this is a really good debut novel and can’t wait to see what else the author comes up with.

Immortal Dark Book 1

Reviews