When Anna Kamoria was attending her North Carolina high school, she also trained in sword fighting and martial arts with her mother Adelyna\u2019s \u201chandsome, stoic\u201d friend Derrick, and she felt different from her classmates \u201cin a way that made it hard to relate to others.\u201d One night, her mother was murdered by unknown assailants and Anna disappeared, only to be found back at her former home a year later, with no memory of the lost time. She moved in with family friends and spent the next two years recovering, faking and bullying her way through mandatory psychotherapy and earning her GED. Now, she\u2019s still unable to come to terms with strange memories that she considers \u201ctrauma-induced hallucinations.\u201d Anna revisits the murder scene on her 20th birthday, and Derrick reappears there, explaining that it\u2019s time for Anna to learn about Nightfall, which her mother \u201cforbade me from telling you about\u201d; he calls it \u201ca place for learning.\u201d A wax-sealed letter arrives and invites Anna for an extended Nightfall stay; soon, Anna drinks a nightshade concoction and is whisked away to her new home. Organized survival challenges await, as well as camaraderie and sexy rivalry among Nightfall\u2019s other recruits. Late-night, clandestine rendezvous offer opportunities for forbidden love triangles and information-gathering. Cliques emerge among students who affiliate with longstanding pegasus, dragon, and ravengroups. Ravenwood\u2019s novel follows the winning formula of romantasy series-starters such as Rebecca Yarros\u2019s Fourth Wing\u00a0(2023), with a dash of Holly Black\u2019s The Cruel Prince\u00a0(2018).Although its content warnings are fair, the book doesn\u2019t go as far as horror-adjacent dark romantasies such as Leigh Bardugo\u2019s Ninth House (2019).Anna is a somewhat bland protagonist, though, in part because she recalls so little of importance in her life, beyond her amnesia and amnesia-related events. Anna does begin to thrive, however, as she pursues new memories and relationships at Nightfall, and greater challenges, and character growth, hopefully await her in future installments.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When Anna Kamoria was attending her North Carolina high school, she also trained in sword fighting and martial arts with her mother Adelyna\u2019s \u201chandsome, stoic\u201d friend Derrick, and she felt different from her classmates \u201cin a way that made it hard to relate to others.\u201d One night, her mother was murdered by unknown assailants and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7305,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7304"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7304\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}