Dark of the West

We're dropped off immediately into a Prologue. Prologues are just so hard to take seriously even in the best circumstances, and this is certainly not the best circumstances. This is a flash-forward, the worst kind of prologue. If this is the interesting stuff, why are you making me start thousands of words—and in this case several years—earlier?

It was hard to get into. The writing much too much for my tastes. It keeps dropping big Emotional revelations on you, but you don't know what's really going on or these characters or why you should give a fork. So while these big Emotional nuances are being flung towards you like anvils, they land more like a gentle spritz of face spray with a partially blocked nozzle.

Still, I was ready to hum along and to give this book a chance. But it didn't take long for the book to again completely stall me in my tracks. I can't have actually read that line. It cannot actually say what I though it said. Maybe ADHD-brain got to me? So I backtracked and reread this gem several times to make sure neither eyes nor brain was fooling around.



Nope. It actually said that.

The girl who had promised to love him for a thousand days.

Now, dear reader, I could not stop my mental calculator from popping open and running some basic long division. A thousand days is slightly over two and a half years. Ah, two and a half years of devotion? How does one get so lucky?

Who can forget the famous balcony scene where Romeo and Juliet are at last together, and their words to each other form a sonnet where they swear their hearts' allegiance for the next two and a half years? Or that time Captain Wentworth mourned his loss of engagement to Anne Elliot for two and a half years and then got over it and then never thought of her again? Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were so devoted to each other for those two and a half years.

The amount of it takes to have a toddler capable of potty training, about the length of time Anne Bolyen was Queen of England.

Two and a half years.

If it seems that I am harping unduly this, know that 1) it's because I am genuinely delighted by it and teasing out all possible implications of this could entertain me for days, and far more importantly 2) it's kind of the perfect microcosm of this book's problems: While some of it might seem fine even beautiful on the surface, more than ten seconds of thought about it, and you realize that it's nonsense.

The world building is shallow. The north is full of nobles and kings who have colonized the eastern countries, and then there's the south which has brown people and nothing to really do with the other two regions politically? In fact, the south seems to exist only for (deep sigh) the representation points.

(Also not sure how I feel about taking one of the largest and persistent problems faced mostly by poc and giving it to white people. I'm going with just feels kind of icky for right now.)

One of our leads, Aurelia is of color(?), but other than a brief lament that this means she doesn't conform to the court's beauty standards, it doesn't mean anything. She could have been white and nothing would have changed. Look, I don't want characters of color to be constantly faced with racism, prejudice, or microaggressions, but this feels hollow, like slapping tanner on white skin.

(Don't worry! Hathaway still manages to shoehorn some gross brown people tropes into the text though. Havish is sexually promiscuous! And it's hard not to read him as sexually predatory given the large age difference between the two of them. Queen Sinora was illiterate but had an innate cunning! Man, all them brownies do love sneaking around and being backstabby and underhanded! They are just so good at it!)


In the same vein, you learn one of Athan's brothers is gay, but this isn't given any nuance or thought. How are gay people treated in world? Is his sexuality a well known fact? Is it surprising that Athan knows this about his brother? At one point, Athan's other brother—the aggressively heterosexual one—asks if Athan prefers boys too. How am I supposed to take this? Is that a legitimate question? Is he being a dick? Is he consciously tapping into years old and systemically embedded prejudice to be a dick?

I don't know because Hathaway doesn't bother to fill in any of these details. Or for any other social issue. The East is stuck in an endless war, so why isn't it sending women? Do women have the vote? Do people of color? For that matter, do I even know if white men can vote?

¯_(ツ)_/¯ says the text.

I might be able to excuse this somewhat if it was broad in scope, but the world doesn't just feel small. It's downright claustrophobic. Athan dreams of running away to be free of the never ending war machine that his home has turned into. He dreams not of running away to lay on the beaches of Fantasy-Fiji or of being a sheep-herder in fantasy-Iceland but of hiding in the mountains that are about three inches away from his home on the map.

Of course, this could also be because Athan is the most unimaginative sort of dullard. He wouldn't even be the only one to grace these pages.

It's not his fault. No one in this book has the sort of personality that you could dive into without worrying about breaking your neck, and Athan was the one that held my attention for the longest. I was interested to see how he went from trying to escape to becoming a commander, but it turns out he has no real arc. As soon as his mother dies, he steps up to play ball.

As for our female lead, Aurelia is a spoiled princess, and we've all seen this before. Normally, I like spoiled princesses. Watching them develop into interesting nuanced characters is a good time, but Aurelia is the most boring and most static version of this trope that I have seen in ages. Eventually, she becomes an impressive sniper at least according to the prologue, but Hathaway planted absolutely no seeds for that in this book. Her eagle eye is solely devoted to noticing her best friend's breasts. (This happened so often that I began to wonder if it was foreshadowing for a bi reveal. It wasn't naturally, but it was something almost interesting about her for a while.)

With our two leads being fairly lackluster, the rest of the cast fares a little better. All the bad characters are two steps away from twirling their mustaches and cackling. For example, Aurelia's uncle is Mean and Bad because he hunts and trains his dogs to tear little fawns to shreds because, sure, that's definitely how hunting works. While General Dakar and his devotion to the revolution is of course abusive towards his sons and drives his wife to drink. The most interesting of the lot are Queen Sinora, Aurelia's mother, former ace sniper, eastern alley, southern expat, turned northern ruler. In a just world, this would be her story but we're stuck with her drip of a daughter instead. Alas. Cyar, Athan's best friend, is also a bright spot. His friendship really helps to bring out the best of Athan's character, and their interactions are some of the best sections of the book although I could not exactly divine the reason as to why he has ended up in the Eastern army and fighting a war that wasn't even his. (Cyar, if you're being held captive against your will, blink twice, okay?)


Plotwise, nothing happens. Our two leads don't meet until—what? Sixty percent of the way through, and they pretty much immediately fall for each other, and then some more nothing happens, and the book ends.

All in all, it felt like I read the overly long prologue to a more interesting novel.

I've been excited for Dark of the West since I first saw glimmers of it on the internet. It should come as no surprise to any of you here, since sweeping lands and epic battles tend to be my favorite subject matter. I'm also a sucker for star-crossed lovers of any kind, so the story that was set to take place between Athan and Aurelia seemed like something I'd fall madly in love with. I really couldn't wait to dive straight in. No apologies friends, this is going to be a lengthy review.

Now, in all fairness, the prologue threw me off a little bit and I want to let anyone else know that picks this book up that it's a little misleading. Keep reading, because the rest of the book will pull back and let you take in everything that led up to that little moment in time. I finally understood the intent after I'd read through a few chapters. To see our two characters in a moment when their war torn world had turned them against one another, and then to see the story unfold that got them to that point. To avoid spoilers, I can't say more. I will say, I almost wish that prologue hadn't been there. I very much enjoyed just getting to know our two protagonists, and I kind of wish I would have skipped and it read it at the end.

Oh, and trust me, these two protagonists will steal your heart just as easily as they did mine. I loved the fact that this story is told from a dual POV, and loved it even fiercer for the fact that both Athan and Aurelia get an even amount of the story telling space. Being allowed to see things unfold from both of their perspectives is really what made this book soar. To be able to see events, sometimes cataclysmic, and their effects on the world at large was grand. To be able to see how those events affected not only Athan and Aurelia, but their whole small worlds, was even better. I felt like it gave me a lot of time to love them, to see their personalities unfold, and to really see the cleverness that was hidden in each of their minds. Two young people, trapped under the thumbs of their elders, but with enough passion and intelligence to do loads more if only they had the chance. That, was my favorite part.

Which is why this book started to weigh on me after a while, alas. Although Joanna Hathaway does an excellent job of building this sweeping world, and the war threatening to tear it apart, the battles and coupes are the main focus of this book. I grew tired of listening to political intrigue after a while. Some chapters felt like they could have been wrapped up in many less pages, if only Athan or Aurelia would stop thinking so incessantly and actually act. I know this was all for the benefit of the brewing uprising. I know that this was a way to get the reader really entrenched in the treachery of it all. For quite a long while, I was a happy to follow along. It wore me down though, and soon I just wanted more of Athan and Aurelia. More of their brightness, and their intelligence, and less of their terrible parents and their war.

This story is solid. The premise of this book is beautifully handled, and I loved a lot of what I read. The writing does justice to the vast story that it creates, and Hathaway easily shows her prowess as an author. There was honestly a lot here that made me smile. It just stretched on quite beyond what I was expecting. The ending, especially, was like stumbling down a steep hill with nothing to hold onto. I grasped at every little scene that hinted at the promise that things were coming around to the prologue I mentioned above. Instead, it rolled into an ending that leaves things open for the next book, like I assumed it would. This is the first in a series, and the ending has no qualms with letting you know that.

My deepest wish is that the next book has more action. I need more romance, more familial relationships, more plotting and scheming by our protagonists. Preferably, I'd love to see a little less military precision. I think now that all the cards have been laid out on the table, there's some promise of that and I'm excited once again. I can't wait to see what happens next.