Shadow of Night review!

There’s always a sigh when you finish when you finish a book. I don’t know if it’s relief, dismay, happiness or sadness. There’s just a sigh … like a release. It’s done! It’s over! I’ve finished it! It was amazing! And then comes the ‘book hangover’.

I am a terrible believer in the book hangover. This feeling of being yanked out of a world you’d inhabited for too long that you now come to realise isn’t real and never will no matter how much you wish it and no film or television will ever be able to recreate it in just the same way.

And finally the question of what on Earth am I going to read next?!

This all happened after I finished reading the Shadow of Night. Fortunately I have picked out my next read. Something light and refreshing and I will let you wait and stew over what it will be until my next Teaser Tuesday.

But first let me introduce my book …

The Shadow Of Night by Deborah Harkness

In my first review of Deborah Harkness’ work, A Discovery Of Witches, I said the book was “twilight meets Dan Brown”. I still stand by my my opinion of that first book, but I can’t seem to find a comparison like it for this one. The story has evolved into something else. It is unique and I simply can’t get enough. Someday someone is going to come along and say if you like Discovery Of Witches you’ll love this… And I think that is a pretty high compliment in the world of books. Not for the other book, I think I would rather be my own book than someone else’s. But I digress…

I think I’m more in love with Matthew and Diana than I ever was before, but there are so many new characters that we get to fall in love with, a lot of them historical figures and persons of interest. In fact in the back of the book there is a list of all important with in the book and Harkness also marks on which of her characters were real people.Personally I’d never heard of the School of Night, a large part of the book, but I can’t wait to find out more. It felt like I was diving straight back into history and I, quite like Diana, was reluctant to leave.

I think, and some of you might not see this as a downfall, the only downfall was I was waiting for them to go back to the future. I wanted to see what happened and she left rather a big bombshell just in the last few pages that I want to find out how it happened. But I spent a lot of time just thinking why aren’t they back. They’ve done what they set out to do, why are they still there? I think my problem was the book was too long. What you’d cut out, I’ve no idea I loved every moment of it but it took too long to get back to our own time.

My favourite new character has to be Gallowglass. I love the way that he interacts with Diana, calling her Auntie and how protective he becomes of her, how he can’t seem to stop her from getting into trouble, but in some ways I’m sure that he doesn’t try that hard. I can’t wait to see how they interact in the future. A friend dropped a huge hint on me when I expressed this idea to her that it won’t be everything I’m expecting it to be, or rather the truth will shock me.

I think we get the overall. I loved the book. Slightly too long in places but I would absolutely recommend it to anyone. Deborah Harkness has joined my all time favourite author list along with Rowling, Riordan and Austin.

For now that is all I have to say. I hope you enjoyed my review and let me know what her you agree and if you don’t let me know why.

Yours,

Chiara.x