rating all of the night world novels
Jan. 3rd, 2022 09:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhodochrositejust finished my annual night world reread so i really want to talk about it... this is like half a review post half a rec post for my favourite ya series ever. NIGHT WORLD by lj smith is a ya supernatural romance series based on the premise that magical beings (vampires, shifters and witches) live alongside but separate from humans in a secret society known as the night world. every book is a loosely-interconnected standalone focusing on a different couple's forbidden romance when their soulmate connection kicks in, while in the background the prophesied apocalypse looms closer and closer, so you can pretty much read in any order, and they are all quite short and mindless.
this series is for guys who like TROPES... like i am not a soulmate trope liker but the night world take on it is soooooo delicious to me because so many of the soulmate couples are ENEMIES and even the ones that are not usually try to resist the fated connection!! and the soulmate thing only kicks in when skin-to-skin contact happens so there's a great element of physicality as well. there is a nice balance between friends to lovers soulmates and enemies to lovers soulmates so i truly believe there is a night world book for everyone. lj smith mostly writes 2 kinds of heroines (Determined Shoujo Heroine Girl and Jaded Battle-Hardened Girl), and 2~3 kinds of love interests (Genuinely Nice Guy and Bad Boy With Secret Heart Of Gold and Bad Boy Subtype: Cold Uptight CEO) and it slaps every time just trust me. i love repression and denial of feelings... i love enemies... i love elaborate cliquey social structures... i love magic... i love doom... and i love love.
unfortunately the series is a permawip, the last book has been pending for like 20 years so i don't think we're ever going to see how exactly the apocalypse plays out. other than the plot cliffhanger it's also a shame because from the previously released previews it seems that the last book's central romance would have been a girl with two soulmates, the guy who brought about the apocalypse and the guy prophesied to stop the apocalypse And They Were All Classmates which would have been very fun to see.
i will try to keep this as spoiler-free as possible!!
1. SECRET VAMPIRE
SYNOPSIS: vampire boy breaks the law to turn his human childhood best friend who is dying from cancer into a vampire to save her life.
MAIN CP: childhood best friends to lovers, it's pretty standard vampire boy x human girl forbidden romance but also they're already longtime best friends.
OVERALL: not really any romance tropes that i like and also not a particularly thrilling story but it's fine enough as the series opener, it's mostly there to set up the concept of the night world + the forbidden romance angle because the two night world laws are 2) don't tell humans about the night world 2) don't fall in love with humans (presumably due to rule 1).
poppy is cute, a pretty typical peppy determined ya heroine. james is umm.... kind of forgettable. like he has all the standard cool handsome rich vampire traits so he's fine enough i guess. i don't have much to say i usually skip this one when i reread the series lol.
MY RATING: 5/10 i do enjoy the part where ash (book 2 love interest) shows up to corrupt newly vampirised poppy and whisk her away from james for fun and to piss james off, and also thea (book 3 heroine) and blaise (also in book 3) cameo
2. DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS
SYNOPSIS: human girl accidentally discovers that the three beautiful girls who just moved in next door are vampires who ran away from their oppressive society, and then gets caught up in night world business when their brother shows up to bring them home.
MAIN CP: vampire boy x human girl, bad boy with secret heart of gold x fearless stubborn girl, slap-slap-kiss bickery type dynamic, both of them are highly resistant to the idea of falling in love with each other, they keep accidentally getting along super well and then bristling at each other when they realise, extremely standard ya supernatural romance dynamic AND I LOVE TO SEE IT!!!!! love me a ケンカップル that does stupid petty violent stuff like kick at each other's shins. they do keep doing the annoying thing where they flirt via quoting classic literature at each other to show how tasteful and intelligent they are but since this came out in the 90s i'll forgive it.
OVERALL: mary-lynnette is a fun narrator! aries sun pisces venus energy tsundere :') the hate but attraction at first sight compounded by the ~soulmate connection~ when they accidentally touch is sooo good and i love her friendship with ash's three runaway sisters. also her passion for stargazing is like so weirdly heart-touching to me, there's a rly cute scene where she tears up looking through her telescope and thinking about how unimaginably vast the universe is and then gets embarrassed about Having Feelings.
I LOVE ASH the most archetypal bad boy out of the whole series... handsome selfish lazy confident playboy jerk type... he is one of my favourite night world love interests, partly because i think his name is great haha but also because i will always love asshole guys whose secret vulnerabilities are relentlessly dragged out by the heroine... i like that ash is so gone for mary-lynnette that, even though they separate at the end of the book, he's devoted himself to making himself into a guy worthy of her. like it's just sooooo satisfying to me that he's like constantly helplessly pining for her in all the cameos he has in the later books. ALSO his dynamic with quinn (love interest of book 5 and my other favourite) is soooo funny i love elite assholes polite-society sniping at each other even as they're working together.
also the kiss scene involves mary-lynnette being mad about the difference in their physical power levels -> ash hands her a wooden branch to use as a stake to even things out between them -> she puts it to his throat and backs him up against a tree -> then she drops it and THEY KISS!! sooo romantic.
MY RATING: 10/10 it's the perfect example of the guys diverting their attraction into aggression and confrontation trope <3
3. SPELLBINDER
SYNOPSIS: two witch cousins navigating the latest high school in their long history of expulsions because one of them enjoys seducing and breaking human boys, and this time she's set her sights on the heroine's soulmate.
MAIN CP: human boy x witch girl, kind boy x repressed responsible girl.
OVERALL: the witches are my favourite night world faction so i really really love the focus on them in this book i love MAGIC. tbh the romance is kind of whatever the real draw of this book is the BEING GIRLS IS THE MOST SPECIAL AND TERRIBLE AND BEAUTIFUL THING IN THE WORLD dynamic between thea (less evil witch) and her cousin blaise (more evil witch)... ummm gary i love bitchy cliquey nasty private school girls lacking in moral compunction... i love blaise queen of gaslight gatekeep girlboss... i love that when it comes down to it, despite their ideological and personality clashes and their rivalry and all the complicated grief and frustration of their various fallings out, blaise and thea love each other so much and would do anything for each other....... like even before all the real shit starts going down and blaise doesn't know thea is challenging blaise's claim on eric because they're soulmates, blaise is so happy and excited that thea is showing interest in Evil Witch Hobby: Fucking With Humans For Entertainment and even offers to coach her on how to entrap eric. and then in the end blaise just wanted thea to be happy even if it was a betrayal of everything they'd ever known and even if it meant she could never see thea again T__T blaise is cruel and amoral and selfish and power-hungry and floats through life with complete disregard for others but she loves thea more than anything else in the whole world!!
i do really like thea and her loyalty and strong sense of responsibility even though she starts off with the usual night worlder lack of concern for human life, i think it was so interesting to get a night worlder heroine pov and witness the cognitive dissonance and Transformation Via Love from the inside. eric is nice i guess. like his main character trait is liking animals. he's kind of just there. being nice enthusiastic puppy type. and it's sweet that he's just like super into thea.
MY RATING: 9/10 knocked 1 point off because even though the main het is inoffensive it just doesn't have the flavour of the others. but seriously... GIRLS....
4. DARK ANGEL
SYNOPSIS: witch girl's powers awaken when a mysterious guardian angel saves her from death, he teaches her how to harness her magic to conquer her high school's social hierarchy but starts pushing things in scary directions.
MAIN CP: human boy x witch girl, except the witch girl is being mentored by a handsome ghost so it's kind of a love triangle thing but not really.
OVERALL: unfortunately i have to say this is the flop of the series. the vibes are kind of awful... gillian is fine and seeing her come into her heritage and gaslight gatekeep girlboss her way through high school cliques was pretty satisfying ngl even though the relationships between the girls were disappointingly pretty lacking. but david pisses me off like i really don't know why gillian even likes him. like he kind of has asshole bad boy with secret heart of gold vibes but super half-hearted and he's a human so like he is not offering much. i'll be honest i don't remember too clearly i had to go check that i got his name right. oh i just remembered he almost kisses gillian when he's still dating a different girl 1800 I HATE CHEATERS.
and i love toxic manipulative mentorships so much but gillian's guardian angel just had terrible vibes and then he was kind of pathetic at the end. AND HIS NAME IS GARY. anyway i usually skip this one too when i reread.
MY RATING: 1/10 for ash's cameo i love to see my boy on his redemption arc.
5. THE CHOSEN
SYNOPSIS: vampire hunter infiltrates vampire enclave to destroy it from the inside by allowing herself to get human trafficked into it as a blood source.
MAIN CP: enemies to lovers, vampire boy x vampire hunter girl, icy cruel repressed ceo-type boy x repressed cynical soldier girl
OVERALL: my feelings about this book are so mixed it's really epic highs and lows... it has the sexiest premise out of the entire series but unfortunately does not stick the landing T__T the execution is a bit disappointing... all the amazing tense hateristic buildup is resolved way too fast and they move from the enemies to the lovers part in like 1 page. when i first read the series like 10 years ago or whenever this was my fave one but it really didn't hold up on subsequent rereads. i love it more for its potential )': we literally could have had it all... SOCIETY IF rashel and quinn kept angrily repressing their attraction to each other and didn't get together and embarked on the roadtrip indicated at the end of the book on the premise of a careful enemy-of-my-enemy truce....... i do love their battle couple moments though, love to see two talented powerful highrankers fighting back to back.
that said, i like rashel a lot! i love her jadedness and coolness and dark humour layered over a deeply hidden heart... bad girl with secret soft side. some really sweet girlsgirlsgirls moments between rashel and the younger more innocent girls who were also imprisoned with her. quinn is uhh.... kind of irredeemably awful... like kidnaps and trafficks human girls to vampires as food awful.... but unfortunately i am susceptible to guys who are ethical deserts and quinn is my favourite love interest out of all of them :/ i love guys who are the killer. it's not my fault. he has such a sexy name and a tortured tragic backstory too... and so does rashel... I LOVE TROPES.
MY RATING: 7/10 and i'm really sad about it this literally could have been a 100/10 book.
6. SOULMATE
SYNOPSIS: girl begins remembering her past lives and the boy who she fell in love with in all of them... but turns out he is THE KILLER?
MAIN CP: 25 lives style reincarnation romance, vampire boy x human girl who has kept reincarnating through history.
OVERALL: i do not like reincarnation romances so this book is not for me. i actually really like hannah, she has a lot of quiet dignity and fighting spirit even when she feels lost and out of her depth, as befitting a girl whose soul has been around since caveman times or whatever. and i think it's so satisfying that she basically gets like cinderella'd into night world royalty because thierry is like the king of vampires since he's the first vampire ever created. thierry himself is fine, i think two of the most desirable traits in a love interest are being alive and being in love with the protag and thierry has both in spades. also like his main driving force in (un)life is to look for hannah across all her incarnations, i do enjoy a depressed 1. but also no offense to the french but thierry is just... it's not a desirable love interest name, which is really bugging me tbh.
and also maya (the first vampire ever and the one who turned thierry) and hannah had such a sexy dynamic like it was so good when maya was convincing hannah that thierry was only being kind to her because he wanted to toy with her and then kill her like he had in all her other lives. like the corruption potential. the onesided haterisms potential. the dubcon potential. etc etc. and i was really happy to see the cameos from previous books' soulmate pairs!! more acting cool but obviously pining from ash, the only one who doesn't have his soulmate with him yet.
MY RATING: 6/10 again the main tropes are not really my thing but i was surprised that i still enjoyed it quite a bit when i reread.
7. HUNTRESS
SYNOPSIS: vampire girl who renounced vampirehood to live among humans must infiltrate her former vampire gang to protect and retrieve one of the keys to stopping the apocalypse.
MAIN CP: childhood friends to rivals to leader x second-in-command (direction constantly flipping due to back-and-forth leadership challenges) to enemies to lovers, vampire boy x vampire girl who is actually half-human.
OVERALL: absolutely the bangerest ship dynamic!!!!!! the rivalry, the competitiveness, the constant tension, the unexpected accidental moments of sweetness and vulnerability and intimacy, the bitterness and betrayal and heartbreak first when jez disappeared and then again when she came back and revealed she was half-human.... chef's kiss. i love the worldbuilding detail of night worlders fucking around with humans just because they're powerful enough to do so, like the witches seducing and ruining human guys in spellbinder, and here vampire gangs hunting humans for sport.
jez's total lack of emotional awareness is so good and even once she renounces her evil vampire ways she's still kind of a stuck-up asshole, which is righteous and i love her. morgead is also an asshole but like it's mostly to level with jez? he's the one with a slightly more sensitive heart, though it's pretty well-hidden. or it could just be jez's extremely low EQ pov. the reunion scene between jez and morgead when she shows up again in her infiltration mission is literally her breaking into his apartment and challenging him to a leadership duel and then getting surprised when he's upset about the whole, disappeared on everyone without a single word thing... like she just has noooo idea that morgead actually cares about her and is IN LOVE with her and then she gets mad when he yields at the end of their fight because she thinks he's looking down on her. jez has always viewed morgead as her arch nemesis but i don't think morgead felt quite the same way, i think morgead has always been more aware of his feelings for jez than vice versa. WHICH (one-sided rivalry) I LOVE TO SEE ALL THE TIME!!! like, quinn/rashel is like 2 predators slowly circling e/o forever on the verge of attack but morgead/jez is constantly in the battle stage.
i think the romance really works for me because the pacing isn't overly fast like some of the other books, jez and morgead do have history together and even once they make the soulmate connection they actually reject it and stay denying their feelings and doubling down on the haterism to compensate. but morgead is really just waiting for jez to admit to herself that she's also in love :') i love everything about this book so much... perfect dynamix ever...the ending still makes me die from how blindingly romantic it is...
MY RATING: 11/10 this is lj smith at her absolute best. objectively just the best night world book altogether.
8. BLACK DAWN
SYNOPSIS: girl tries to track down her missing brother, winds up enslaved in a secluded vampire kingdom, and starts a revolution.
MAIN CP: vampire boy x human girl, prince x leader of the revolution.
OVERALL: love the little dip into fantasy tropes/basically isekai lmao because this book focuses on a sect of the vampires who broke away entirely from the human world to live in their own separate medieval kingdom, it's a fun change of setting. maggie is my favourite out of the Determined Girl subset of night world heroines, she's kind in a way that doesn't feel overly disney princess (poppy...) and her motivations make sense to me.
delos is interesting because he doesn't really fit either the Bad Boy or Nice Boy night world love interest archetypes (maybe Bad Boy: Cold CEO subtype), i like his raised-as-weapon-now-reclaiming-his-own-agency character arc and his surprising emotional vulnerability... dare i say meow meow... he's so sheltered/spoiled in some ways but also he's undergone a lot of cruelty and violence because his family want him to be a controllable puppet nuclear bomb basically but he still has a sense of conscience and honour underneath it all. delos is really kind of princess locked in the tower trope. like he is the maiden in question and maggie is the knight who comes to rescue him. also a bit of kirian vibes especially with the I Killed Your Brother (not really) plot point.
MY RATING: 10/10 the last few books of the series are seriously banger after banger after banger.
9. WITCHLIGHT
SYNOPSIS: shifter girl must protect one of the keys to stopping the apocalypse from a dragon while trying not to let her growing feelings for her bodyguardee's fiance interfere.
MAIN CP: shifter boy x shifter girl, gentle boy in an arranged political engagement to another girl x repressed cynical soldier girl who is bodyguarding his fiancee.
OVERALL: THE DUTY VS LOVE I ATE DELICIOUS!!!!!!!!!!!! i love jaded girl idealistic boy... i love keller's horror at the way she's slowly starting to fall for galen not just because she's deeply repressed and cynical and sees emotions as liabilities but also because the literal fate of the world is at stake and galen and iliana (witch princess galen is betrothed to) NEED to fall in love so the alliance between witches and shifters will hold and they can fight off the apocalypse so keller absolutely cannot get in the way... and ofc keller's growing feelings for both galen and iliana meaning she doesn't want to hurt either of them so all she can do is pine from afar... not even afar, from right next to iliana since she's bodyguarding her...!!!! galen's steadiness and patience and kindness are all things keller initially views as weaknesses but she grows to see their value and FALL IN LOVE.
also extremely excellent ot3 energies, some highly potent being girls is the most special thing in the universe between iliana and keller... i really love the way keller went from being irritated by iliana's naivete and girliness to being totally devoted to her once she saw the depth of iliana's selflessness and courage despite her lack of combat ability... iliana's slay the world magic hero moment in the climax while galen and keller watch on both heavily injured and close to death gets me so fucking hyped every time. and iliana breaking off her engagement to galen so he could get together with keller AND still salvaging the political alliance between the witches and shifters by doing a blood tie ceremony with KELLER to bond them together!!!
this is also the book i loosely modelled teiits off LOL.
MY RATING: 10/10 absolutely everything about this book is chef's kiss from the characters to the dynamics to the plot. it's actually ok that the last book will never come out because this one is such an epic note to end on despite all the hanging plot threads.
this series is for guys who like TROPES... like i am not a soulmate trope liker but the night world take on it is soooooo delicious to me because so many of the soulmate couples are ENEMIES and even the ones that are not usually try to resist the fated connection!! and the soulmate thing only kicks in when skin-to-skin contact happens so there's a great element of physicality as well. there is a nice balance between friends to lovers soulmates and enemies to lovers soulmates so i truly believe there is a night world book for everyone. lj smith mostly writes 2 kinds of heroines (Determined Shoujo Heroine Girl and Jaded Battle-Hardened Girl), and 2~3 kinds of love interests (Genuinely Nice Guy and Bad Boy With Secret Heart Of Gold and Bad Boy Subtype: Cold Uptight CEO) and it slaps every time just trust me. i love repression and denial of feelings... i love enemies... i love elaborate cliquey social structures... i love magic... i love doom... and i love love.
unfortunately the series is a permawip, the last book has been pending for like 20 years so i don't think we're ever going to see how exactly the apocalypse plays out. other than the plot cliffhanger it's also a shame because from the previously released previews it seems that the last book's central romance would have been a girl with two soulmates, the guy who brought about the apocalypse and the guy prophesied to stop the apocalypse And They Were All Classmates which would have been very fun to see.
i will try to keep this as spoiler-free as possible!!
1. SECRET VAMPIRE
SYNOPSIS: vampire boy breaks the law to turn his human childhood best friend who is dying from cancer into a vampire to save her life.
MAIN CP: childhood best friends to lovers, it's pretty standard vampire boy x human girl forbidden romance but also they're already longtime best friends.
OVERALL: not really any romance tropes that i like and also not a particularly thrilling story but it's fine enough as the series opener, it's mostly there to set up the concept of the night world + the forbidden romance angle because the two night world laws are 2) don't tell humans about the night world 2) don't fall in love with humans (presumably due to rule 1).
poppy is cute, a pretty typical peppy determined ya heroine. james is umm.... kind of forgettable. like he has all the standard cool handsome rich vampire traits so he's fine enough i guess. i don't have much to say i usually skip this one when i reread the series lol.
MY RATING: 5/10 i do enjoy the part where ash (book 2 love interest) shows up to corrupt newly vampirised poppy and whisk her away from james for fun and to piss james off, and also thea (book 3 heroine) and blaise (also in book 3) cameo
2. DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS
SYNOPSIS: human girl accidentally discovers that the three beautiful girls who just moved in next door are vampires who ran away from their oppressive society, and then gets caught up in night world business when their brother shows up to bring them home.
MAIN CP: vampire boy x human girl, bad boy with secret heart of gold x fearless stubborn girl, slap-slap-kiss bickery type dynamic, both of them are highly resistant to the idea of falling in love with each other, they keep accidentally getting along super well and then bristling at each other when they realise, extremely standard ya supernatural romance dynamic AND I LOVE TO SEE IT!!!!! love me a ケンカップル that does stupid petty violent stuff like kick at each other's shins. they do keep doing the annoying thing where they flirt via quoting classic literature at each other to show how tasteful and intelligent they are but since this came out in the 90s i'll forgive it.
OVERALL: mary-lynnette is a fun narrator! aries sun pisces venus energy tsundere :') the hate but attraction at first sight compounded by the ~soulmate connection~ when they accidentally touch is sooo good and i love her friendship with ash's three runaway sisters. also her passion for stargazing is like so weirdly heart-touching to me, there's a rly cute scene where she tears up looking through her telescope and thinking about how unimaginably vast the universe is and then gets embarrassed about Having Feelings.
I LOVE ASH the most archetypal bad boy out of the whole series... handsome selfish lazy confident playboy jerk type... he is one of my favourite night world love interests, partly because i think his name is great haha but also because i will always love asshole guys whose secret vulnerabilities are relentlessly dragged out by the heroine... i like that ash is so gone for mary-lynnette that, even though they separate at the end of the book, he's devoted himself to making himself into a guy worthy of her. like it's just sooooo satisfying to me that he's like constantly helplessly pining for her in all the cameos he has in the later books. ALSO his dynamic with quinn (love interest of book 5 and my other favourite) is soooo funny i love elite assholes polite-society sniping at each other even as they're working together.
also the kiss scene involves mary-lynnette being mad about the difference in their physical power levels -> ash hands her a wooden branch to use as a stake to even things out between them -> she puts it to his throat and backs him up against a tree -> then she drops it and THEY KISS!! sooo romantic.
MY RATING: 10/10 it's the perfect example of the guys diverting their attraction into aggression and confrontation trope <3
3. SPELLBINDER
SYNOPSIS: two witch cousins navigating the latest high school in their long history of expulsions because one of them enjoys seducing and breaking human boys, and this time she's set her sights on the heroine's soulmate.
MAIN CP: human boy x witch girl, kind boy x repressed responsible girl.
OVERALL: the witches are my favourite night world faction so i really really love the focus on them in this book i love MAGIC. tbh the romance is kind of whatever the real draw of this book is the BEING GIRLS IS THE MOST SPECIAL AND TERRIBLE AND BEAUTIFUL THING IN THE WORLD dynamic between thea (less evil witch) and her cousin blaise (more evil witch)... ummm gary i love bitchy cliquey nasty private school girls lacking in moral compunction... i love blaise queen of gaslight gatekeep girlboss... i love that when it comes down to it, despite their ideological and personality clashes and their rivalry and all the complicated grief and frustration of their various fallings out, blaise and thea love each other so much and would do anything for each other....... like even before all the real shit starts going down and blaise doesn't know thea is challenging blaise's claim on eric because they're soulmates, blaise is so happy and excited that thea is showing interest in Evil Witch Hobby: Fucking With Humans For Entertainment and even offers to coach her on how to entrap eric. and then in the end blaise just wanted thea to be happy even if it was a betrayal of everything they'd ever known and even if it meant she could never see thea again T__T blaise is cruel and amoral and selfish and power-hungry and floats through life with complete disregard for others but she loves thea more than anything else in the whole world!!
i do really like thea and her loyalty and strong sense of responsibility even though she starts off with the usual night worlder lack of concern for human life, i think it was so interesting to get a night worlder heroine pov and witness the cognitive dissonance and Transformation Via Love from the inside. eric is nice i guess. like his main character trait is liking animals. he's kind of just there. being nice enthusiastic puppy type. and it's sweet that he's just like super into thea.
MY RATING: 9/10 knocked 1 point off because even though the main het is inoffensive it just doesn't have the flavour of the others. but seriously... GIRLS....
4. DARK ANGEL
SYNOPSIS: witch girl's powers awaken when a mysterious guardian angel saves her from death, he teaches her how to harness her magic to conquer her high school's social hierarchy but starts pushing things in scary directions.
MAIN CP: human boy x witch girl, except the witch girl is being mentored by a handsome ghost so it's kind of a love triangle thing but not really.
OVERALL: unfortunately i have to say this is the flop of the series. the vibes are kind of awful... gillian is fine and seeing her come into her heritage and gaslight gatekeep girlboss her way through high school cliques was pretty satisfying ngl even though the relationships between the girls were disappointingly pretty lacking. but david pisses me off like i really don't know why gillian even likes him. like he kind of has asshole bad boy with secret heart of gold vibes but super half-hearted and he's a human so like he is not offering much. i'll be honest i don't remember too clearly i had to go check that i got his name right. oh i just remembered he almost kisses gillian when he's still dating a different girl 1800 I HATE CHEATERS.
and i love toxic manipulative mentorships so much but gillian's guardian angel just had terrible vibes and then he was kind of pathetic at the end. AND HIS NAME IS GARY. anyway i usually skip this one too when i reread.
MY RATING: 1/10 for ash's cameo i love to see my boy on his redemption arc.
5. THE CHOSEN
SYNOPSIS: vampire hunter infiltrates vampire enclave to destroy it from the inside by allowing herself to get human trafficked into it as a blood source.
MAIN CP: enemies to lovers, vampire boy x vampire hunter girl, icy cruel repressed ceo-type boy x repressed cynical soldier girl
OVERALL: my feelings about this book are so mixed it's really epic highs and lows... it has the sexiest premise out of the entire series but unfortunately does not stick the landing T__T the execution is a bit disappointing... all the amazing tense hateristic buildup is resolved way too fast and they move from the enemies to the lovers part in like 1 page. when i first read the series like 10 years ago or whenever this was my fave one but it really didn't hold up on subsequent rereads. i love it more for its potential )': we literally could have had it all... SOCIETY IF rashel and quinn kept angrily repressing their attraction to each other and didn't get together and embarked on the roadtrip indicated at the end of the book on the premise of a careful enemy-of-my-enemy truce....... i do love their battle couple moments though, love to see two talented powerful highrankers fighting back to back.
that said, i like rashel a lot! i love her jadedness and coolness and dark humour layered over a deeply hidden heart... bad girl with secret soft side. some really sweet girlsgirlsgirls moments between rashel and the younger more innocent girls who were also imprisoned with her. quinn is uhh.... kind of irredeemably awful... like kidnaps and trafficks human girls to vampires as food awful.... but unfortunately i am susceptible to guys who are ethical deserts and quinn is my favourite love interest out of all of them :/ i love guys who are the killer. it's not my fault. he has such a sexy name and a tortured tragic backstory too... and so does rashel... I LOVE TROPES.
MY RATING: 7/10 and i'm really sad about it this literally could have been a 100/10 book.
6. SOULMATE
SYNOPSIS: girl begins remembering her past lives and the boy who she fell in love with in all of them... but turns out he is THE KILLER?
MAIN CP: 25 lives style reincarnation romance, vampire boy x human girl who has kept reincarnating through history.
OVERALL: i do not like reincarnation romances so this book is not for me. i actually really like hannah, she has a lot of quiet dignity and fighting spirit even when she feels lost and out of her depth, as befitting a girl whose soul has been around since caveman times or whatever. and i think it's so satisfying that she basically gets like cinderella'd into night world royalty because thierry is like the king of vampires since he's the first vampire ever created. thierry himself is fine, i think two of the most desirable traits in a love interest are being alive and being in love with the protag and thierry has both in spades. also like his main driving force in (un)life is to look for hannah across all her incarnations, i do enjoy a depressed 1. but also no offense to the french but thierry is just... it's not a desirable love interest name, which is really bugging me tbh.
and also maya (the first vampire ever and the one who turned thierry) and hannah had such a sexy dynamic like it was so good when maya was convincing hannah that thierry was only being kind to her because he wanted to toy with her and then kill her like he had in all her other lives. like the corruption potential. the onesided haterisms potential. the dubcon potential. etc etc. and i was really happy to see the cameos from previous books' soulmate pairs!! more acting cool but obviously pining from ash, the only one who doesn't have his soulmate with him yet.
MY RATING: 6/10 again the main tropes are not really my thing but i was surprised that i still enjoyed it quite a bit when i reread.
7. HUNTRESS
SYNOPSIS: vampire girl who renounced vampirehood to live among humans must infiltrate her former vampire gang to protect and retrieve one of the keys to stopping the apocalypse.
MAIN CP: childhood friends to rivals to leader x second-in-command (direction constantly flipping due to back-and-forth leadership challenges) to enemies to lovers, vampire boy x vampire girl who is actually half-human.
OVERALL: absolutely the bangerest ship dynamic!!!!!! the rivalry, the competitiveness, the constant tension, the unexpected accidental moments of sweetness and vulnerability and intimacy, the bitterness and betrayal and heartbreak first when jez disappeared and then again when she came back and revealed she was half-human.... chef's kiss. i love the worldbuilding detail of night worlders fucking around with humans just because they're powerful enough to do so, like the witches seducing and ruining human guys in spellbinder, and here vampire gangs hunting humans for sport.
jez's total lack of emotional awareness is so good and even once she renounces her evil vampire ways she's still kind of a stuck-up asshole, which is righteous and i love her. morgead is also an asshole but like it's mostly to level with jez? he's the one with a slightly more sensitive heart, though it's pretty well-hidden. or it could just be jez's extremely low EQ pov. the reunion scene between jez and morgead when she shows up again in her infiltration mission is literally her breaking into his apartment and challenging him to a leadership duel and then getting surprised when he's upset about the whole, disappeared on everyone without a single word thing... like she just has noooo idea that morgead actually cares about her and is IN LOVE with her and then she gets mad when he yields at the end of their fight because she thinks he's looking down on her. jez has always viewed morgead as her arch nemesis but i don't think morgead felt quite the same way, i think morgead has always been more aware of his feelings for jez than vice versa. WHICH (one-sided rivalry) I LOVE TO SEE ALL THE TIME!!! like, quinn/rashel is like 2 predators slowly circling e/o forever on the verge of attack but morgead/jez is constantly in the battle stage.
i think the romance really works for me because the pacing isn't overly fast like some of the other books, jez and morgead do have history together and even once they make the soulmate connection they actually reject it and stay denying their feelings and doubling down on the haterism to compensate. but morgead is really just waiting for jez to admit to herself that she's also in love :') i love everything about this book so much... perfect dynamix ever...the ending still makes me die from how blindingly romantic it is...
MY RATING: 11/10 this is lj smith at her absolute best. objectively just the best night world book altogether.
8. BLACK DAWN
SYNOPSIS: girl tries to track down her missing brother, winds up enslaved in a secluded vampire kingdom, and starts a revolution.
MAIN CP: vampire boy x human girl, prince x leader of the revolution.
OVERALL: love the little dip into fantasy tropes/basically isekai lmao because this book focuses on a sect of the vampires who broke away entirely from the human world to live in their own separate medieval kingdom, it's a fun change of setting. maggie is my favourite out of the Determined Girl subset of night world heroines, she's kind in a way that doesn't feel overly disney princess (poppy...) and her motivations make sense to me.
delos is interesting because he doesn't really fit either the Bad Boy or Nice Boy night world love interest archetypes (maybe Bad Boy: Cold CEO subtype), i like his raised-as-weapon-now-reclaiming-his-own-agency character arc and his surprising emotional vulnerability... dare i say meow meow... he's so sheltered/spoiled in some ways but also he's undergone a lot of cruelty and violence because his family want him to be a controllable puppet nuclear bomb basically but he still has a sense of conscience and honour underneath it all. delos is really kind of princess locked in the tower trope. like he is the maiden in question and maggie is the knight who comes to rescue him. also a bit of kirian vibes especially with the I Killed Your Brother (not really) plot point.
MY RATING: 10/10 the last few books of the series are seriously banger after banger after banger.
9. WITCHLIGHT
SYNOPSIS: shifter girl must protect one of the keys to stopping the apocalypse from a dragon while trying not to let her growing feelings for her bodyguardee's fiance interfere.
MAIN CP: shifter boy x shifter girl, gentle boy in an arranged political engagement to another girl x repressed cynical soldier girl who is bodyguarding his fiancee.
OVERALL: THE DUTY VS LOVE I ATE DELICIOUS!!!!!!!!!!!! i love jaded girl idealistic boy... i love keller's horror at the way she's slowly starting to fall for galen not just because she's deeply repressed and cynical and sees emotions as liabilities but also because the literal fate of the world is at stake and galen and iliana (witch princess galen is betrothed to) NEED to fall in love so the alliance between witches and shifters will hold and they can fight off the apocalypse so keller absolutely cannot get in the way... and ofc keller's growing feelings for both galen and iliana meaning she doesn't want to hurt either of them so all she can do is pine from afar... not even afar, from right next to iliana since she's bodyguarding her...!!!! galen's steadiness and patience and kindness are all things keller initially views as weaknesses but she grows to see their value and FALL IN LOVE.
also extremely excellent ot3 energies, some highly potent being girls is the most special thing in the universe between iliana and keller... i really love the way keller went from being irritated by iliana's naivete and girliness to being totally devoted to her once she saw the depth of iliana's selflessness and courage despite her lack of combat ability... iliana's slay the world magic hero moment in the climax while galen and keller watch on both heavily injured and close to death gets me so fucking hyped every time. and iliana breaking off her engagement to galen so he could get together with keller AND still salvaging the political alliance between the witches and shifters by doing a blood tie ceremony with KELLER to bond them together!!!
this is also the book i loosely modelled teiits off LOL.
MY RATING: 10/10 absolutely everything about this book is chef's kiss from the characters to the dynamics to the plot. it's actually ok that the last book will never come out because this one is such an epic note to end on despite all the hanging plot threads.
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Date: 2022-01-05 12:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-06 02:49 am (UTC)