The Shadow Hour
In a single word this book was: annoying.
While I found the first book in the installment to be creative, witty, and engaging at times (enough to buy the second book) the second book in the series lacked much of the mirth and magic that the first one seemed to create.
Let’s first discuss the characters. While Caius and Jasper are by far the most interesting, they get very little screen time compared to Echo and others. Many of Melissa’s characterizations stems from a tell, don’t show policy, the wrong way to build characters if you want people to actually like them.
For example, Melissa often gives critical detail about what the characters are doing, their facial expressions, and their inner thoughts without letting the reader glean meaning and purpose for themselves. I got that Echo is feeling uncomfortable, you don’t need to tell me, I understand that Dorian is figuratively and metaphorically wearing a mask, I do get the basics of double entendre.
It’s as if Melissa Grey thinks we lack the basic social graces of communication and body language and that she must spell everything out for us-something I found tedious and intensely aggravating.
Second, the plot was riddled with holes and while the book is written in a way that is easy to understand, I found myself constantly wondering why they were doing this or thinking that many of the plans seriously made no sense.
Why did Echo not care Rowan and Caius found her after an ENTIRE chapter talking about how she can’t doom the ones she loves? Why is putting Ivy at Wyvern’s keep the only way to salvage the book that no seems to need? Why was it impossibly easy for Ivy to escape without being killed?
It was just plain ridiculous half the time. Another ridiculous thing is the introduction of not one, but TWO love triangles. At this point in time, the young adult literature fandom has been burnt out on love triangles since Twilight. Say what you will about that series, but love triangles were born and died with it.
Anyone with eyes could see the whole Rowan and Caius dynamic happening but I still found it useless and trivial. It’s obvious that Rowan was a has-been (he didn’t even show up as an important character until this book) and that she’ll choose Caius in the end (I would too).
And the introduction of Quinn was downright baffling. Why did a warlock with starlit eyes and some decent one liners literally show up out of the blue and talk about a past relationship with Jasper not one single reader has heard of before?
It was weird and I felt like the inclusion of Quinn was simply there to hinder the relationship between Dorian and Jasper, another bad decision since the couple is actually interesting and I would have liked to see them finally get together.
Another issue with the book are all the descriptions and inner monologues that go nowhere. Towards the end of the book, I started to downright stop reading the long paragraphs where Echo would think about the ghosts of her past before being swept up into overwhelming feels of confusion and grief.
And it’s not only Echo that does this-all the characters do-and it actually made me facetime my grandmother instead of reading because I was that bored. Reading it once, sure, but reading it over and over again in every chapter got very old, very fast.
Lastly, Melissa Grey’s metaphors have become the bane of my existence. That is all.
All in all, I would not recommend this book. Although it started out strong and characters like Caius and Jasper make you want to keep reading, as well as the random words from other languages that I begrudgingly admit to liking (while simultaneously finding pretentious), the middle trudged slowly and the ending came too hard and too fast, with too much detail and too little left to my own devices.
Recommendation: Read the Girl at Midnight and call it a day.
Score: 3/10
