Nevernight (The Nevernight Chronicle, #1) in SpecFic Buddy Reads

Jul 05, 2019 Emma rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, grimdark

Well this has gone from let alone dnf and more couldn’t get into it at all- to a 4.5 star read. Yes the beginning is confusing. Then there is the school and it gets interesting. Then just when I was starting to get a bit restless withthe story, BAM! And the rest of the story wasn’t what I expected at all! Well played, Kristoff, you blind-sided me!

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Jan 19, 2017 Veronique rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read2018, favourites

4.5

Wow! This was quite a ride!

I’d only met Jay Kristoff in the excellent Illuminae which he wrote in partnership with Amy Kaufman. On his own, the author doesn’t hold any punches. Nevernight is full on, on all levels, which does include violence, bad language, and sexually explicit scenes, as well as adventure and humour. It is a dark tale of revenge after all, one that charts one girl on her journey to avenge her parents by becoming an assassin. To get this deathly knowledge and experience, she ...more

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Dec 27, 2016 Lindsay rated it it was amazing

I really loved this first installment of an epic revenge story with a teenage girl protagonist, but I can see where some other reviewers have issues.

Mia Corvere is the daughter of the leader of a failed rebellion, and in the wake of the terrible vengeance the Roman-like realm has on her family, she flees right into the arms of the assassins of the Church of Our Lady of Blessed Murder. She's sworn vengeance on the people who destroyed her family, and her apprenticeship with a follower of the Chur I really loved this first installment of an epic revenge story with a teenage girl protagonist, but I can see where some other reviewers have issues.

Mia Corvere is the daughter of the leader of a failed rebellion, and in the wake of the terrible vengeance the Roman-like realm has on her family, she flees right into the arms of the assassins of the Church of Our Lady of Blessed Murder. She's sworn vengeance on the people who destroyed her family, and her apprenticeship with a follower of the Church and then her attempts to join it as one of the Red Church's holy Blades are all in the service of that cause. Along with that she's also of a rare and dangerous breed, darkin, marked by the Lady of Night and with a special relationship to darkness and shadows. (The cover of this book is very evocative of all this).

I'm a sucker for magic-school stories, and very happy to add magic-assassin-school stories to that. Turns out that it tends to ratchet up the tension somewhat when lessons include random poisonings, regular death-traps and ministers-of-a-murder-church's idea of corporal punishment. The students are mostly scary, particularly as they all have to murder someone to gain admittance to the school, and if the students are scary then the faculty are terrifying.

There are a few problems though. Firstly, it's being marketed as YA, and in some ways it's definitely part of that genre. The sheer earnestness of it all, the darkest darkity-dark shadowstuff of blood-soaked overblown writing, can and probably would be overwhelming if not for the dryly hilarious footnotes every few pages. (I mixed text and audio with this one, and the audio narrator does the footnotes in a completely different, and very tongue-in-cheek tone. Quite a clever way to do them.) In other ways, this is aggressively not YA, or at least in the upper end of what you'd expect of YA, with graphic sex scenes and even more graphic violence and murder.

If you're at all familiar with Illuminae and Gemina, it's very clear where some of the more gruesome scenes in those come from. This also has a lot of the same sort of humor that comes across in those, albeit mostly a lot darker.

I must praise the world-building in this as well. It's clear that we're only getting a scratch on the surface of a fascinating world and underlying story. The Itreyan Republic is modeled on Rome before the rise of Julius Caesar but is heading towards becoming an empire under a tyrant. And the core of the tyrant's power is the support of the Church of Aa, the opposing force to the Red Church that Mia is involved with, and very capable of performing brutal and evil acts in the name of Light. And along with all that the deities that these Churches revere seem to be powerful with effects reaching through to the normal world, not least of which are the suns in the sky that give the book its name.

I really enjoyed it, and while the prose can get a little purple, it's a book about teenagers and vengeance ... that sort of writing seems appropriate. ...more

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Aug 21, 2017 Robyn rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2017

4.5 stars. Really funny, morbid, fantasy tale about a girl training to become an elite assassin - and building her own legend in the process.

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Feb 22, 2017 Lata rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: sf-f-h, x2017-read

Enjoyed it, despite some really eye-rolling aspects and rather florid language.

Mia Corvere is out to avenge her family. She's the daughter of a dead member of a failed coup d'etat. Her mother and brother were imprisoned for her father's crime, while she narrowly escapes being murdered by her father's fellow soldiers.

The story takes place partly in a Rome-like alternate city in a world with three suns (the three suns are important as they're worshipped by the population) and in an assassin schoo ...more

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Jan 12, 2017 Helen rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Wow! This is totally awesome!! Mia loses her family to the state and embarks on a mission of revenge, to that end, training to become an assassin.

The world building is phenomenal and continues to thrill the reader throughout. The settings are intriguing as are the characters that we meet. Assassin school has never been so real! The title refers to the two suns, that leave the land bathed in constant light. Difficult for sneaking about in and I constantly forgot that night time was in full daylig ...more

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Jul 07, 2019 Amanda rated it it was amazing

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Dec 30, 2019 Christina Pilkington rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites-of-all-time, genre-fantasy

I broke down and read the entire Nevernight trilogy this year...and I loved it!

I read both rave reviews and also reviews proclaiming this the worst book people had read. So I wasn't that enthusiastic about picking it up right away. But after watching a few book tube video from people with similar reading tastes as mine, I decided to give it a shot.

I LOVED the writing style! I know that was what tripped up a lot of people, but I found it smooth to read and easy to fall into the story. For me, t ...more

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Oct 17, 2019 Liam || Books 'n Beards rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2019, audio, fantasy, bought-2019, owned-audible

You know it's a good book when I make myself 10 minutes late for work because I wanted to sit in the car and finish listening to it.

I really enjoyed Nevernight! I know I'm late to the party, and it's a party I've been aware of and have kind of walked past on the street several times, but whenever I looked at people talking about the party they were the kind of people who would probably do jello shots off of various trashy YA series' asses, so I've thus far decided not to enter.

However I was betw ...more

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Jan 15, 2019 Suzanne rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy

I enjoyed the snarky tone of the side stories/world building a lot, and this world is interesting. I definitely will continue with the series.

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Jun 25, 2019 jovena s rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fantasy

- pls give me more of lord cassius
- is mister kindly good? evil? selfish? who knows
- SCHOOL FOR ASSASSINS

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Sep 24, 2018 Jessica rated it it was amazing

Shelves: audible

I loved it! It started off a little slow and I almost put it down as it might not be my kind of book, but I'm glad I stuck through it. I'm reading the series now! ...more

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