Darkness before dawn

One of the best vampire books I’ve read in a long time. I love the storyline. Dawn Montgomery is a complex character as a 17 year old who just lost both her parents in this post apocalyptic world of vampires winning the war. She starts out with Michael, her friend and boyfriend since they were children. Until she meets Victor who turns out to be a vampire, but not just any vampire. He’s the son of the ruler of Denver and of an old family of vampires, one of the original 14 families. I’m currently reading book 2 because it was so good!

First of all, please forgive my eventual bad spelling. English is not my first language.

Ok, so, I've drowned in this world of reviews and got to reading the reviews with the least stars for some books I was finding interesting, so I came here wanting to see the reviews for a book I have read.
I've found lots of 1 or 2 star reviews and suddenly I felt the need to defend the fact that I actually liked this book/series quite a lot.

I have to start by saying I'm not into vampire books that much. Twilight was my very first experience with vampires and romance focused novels, and Darkness Before Dawn is just my second experience with romance focused teen stories, so there you go. I'm a fantasy/high fantasy girl that bought this book on a Kindle Daily Deal for lack of what to read on Kindle while waiting for the next Dresden Files to come out. Now there you have some cool vampires. But I digress, let's get back.

The important thing is, I don't know all the books people are saying are the originals, the great amazing books from which this one was clearly and poorly copied. So to me, coming straight from Twilight (I've read about real vampires since then, of course, including Dracula, but you get my meaning), this was completely different.

Things I don't like so much:

Victor falling for Dawn is all too sudden, all too unexplained. I like her take on things, she owes him her life but once she finds out he's a vampire she hates him, tries to forget him, fights her feelings, even “tries” to kill him, but he not once gets mad at her or stops coming after her even when she says she doesn't want him around. There's just nothing to fall so hard for in Dawn that he couldn't have found in 400 years. And I'm not even saying it's her fault, I actually like her.

The plot is pretty predictable... From the prologue I was already thinking what is her father hiding? Why does the big vampire lord want her to be delegate? It has to be the same thing. And as I got to books 2 and 3, yeah, there it was, dead right what I've been guessing.
Bad guy is obviously the bad guy, from the second he steps into the school. Only two things surprised me in this book: I was not expecting the Day Walker thing, so despite knowing Sin was the bad guy, I didn't know how. I think looking back it's just a smart plot device to give the books a way of moving forward since things are shaky between vamps and humans but are still manageble as long as vamps can only come out at night. The other thing was that the dead brother was the second vilian/monster.

Michael was for me by far the worst charachter, one day the perfect boyfriend/best friend, the next all needy and rebelious and wanting to hurt Dawn for her crime of acting responsible after all the horros she'd been seeing. I was expecting him to be like Galad from Wheel of Time, all “I'll do what's right no matter if it hurts me or those I love”, after all, he wants to be one of the elite vampire fighters, why in Hell would he endanger that for anything? I was so annoyed at him that I found myself hoping Dawn would do something very, very stupid and get very, very hurt or nearly killed just so he would feel guilty.

The writing. Would have been much, much easier to read and would flow much better if written in 3rd person instead of 1st.

Things I did like:

I really liked the worldbuilding. Again, this may be copied from other books, but I haven't read them, so for me this is all very new and different and I like the idea. I like the vampires taking over and messing up and ending up depending on donations while still trying to inspire fear. I like the war and the way humans lost and are now confined to walled cities. I don't really like that people refer to the world being like this, but we see and hear only about the US. How did other countries manage it? But considering the worldbuilding, they'd have no way of knowing, so that's kind of ok...

I do like Dawn. She's not perfect, she's not as badass as she'd like to, she's often scared, afraid or angry, she doesn't have the fighting skills she thinks she has and usually freezes when danger is close. But she knows all that and keeps going all the same, she wants to protect her friends and her city despite danger to herself, and she's just a teen after all. Coming back to my only other reference, she's just worlds ahead of Bella for me. And she simply refuses to be turned.

I like the small things that did surprise me, mentioned above, I like the things that are different from what I'd seen before, like the Day Walkers and the Thirst. I like the take on the cities and the Night Watchmen and the Night Train. I like Sin, how he's this obvious bad guy. Not that I like the way people just fall for him, but I like how he has everything planned from the start.

I also like the way the books are what a trilogy is supposed to be. They're one big story that could've been edited into one big book, but cut in the right places so that they feel somewhat closed, with their own developments and cliffs at the end. And it ends at the 3rd and that's it. I don't particularly like how everything played out at the end of book 3, some things seemed to be too easy or convinient and quick, but it was OK.

All in all, I do like the books and found them very fun and entertaining for a light read.