Turning darkness into light – ARC review!

Title: Turning darkness into light.

Author: Marie Brennan.

Format: E-ARC.

Publisher:  Tor Books.

Page count: 245.

Release day: August 20^th 2019.

Genre: Adult, fantasy.

Rating: 2 stars.

*Thanks to NetGalley for providing this arc!*

What is it about? (Summary from GoodReads)

As the renowned granddaughter of Isabella Camherst (Lady Trent, of the riveting and daring Draconic adventure memoirs) Audrey Camherst has always known she, too, would want to make her scholarly mark upon a chosen field of study.

When Lord Gleinheigh recruits Audrey to decipher a series of ancient tablets holding the secrets of the ancient Draconean civilization, she has no idea that her research will plunge her into an intricate conspiracy, one meant to incite rebellion and invoke war. Alongside dearest childhood friend and fellow archeologist Kudshayn, must find proof of the conspiracy before it’s too late.

My thoughts:

I was quite excited about this book, just because I thought it would eb about dragons. It is, kinda, but not in the way I expected.

Unfortunately I was not a big fan of this one. My main problem came from the format, this book is written in letters and journal entries. Normally I really like that format, but I don’t think fantasy is the right genre for this format. I definitely was not for this book! It really threw me off from the story, I kept being confused who the letters were written to.

Another thing I didn’t like were the time jumps. There would be a page saying ‘5 years earlier’, so we would go 5 years in the past, which makes total sense. But then a couple of pages later we would go back to the ‘current time’ without any announcement. And since both the current and the past were about the same characters, this was very confusing.

For the story, I really missed background information. They kept talking about people from different parts of the world, but I would have liked to know the relations between these countries. Because sometimes they sounded quite negative when they said ‘oh she is half-something’, and I wanted to know why that is ‘bad’.

They also had to translate a text, and I just didn’t get why that was important. I guess this kinda goes back to the lack of background. It only made sense at the end of the book.

Where the dragons come into the story is from these translated text, and one of the races in this book are ‘half-dragon’!

This next thing was probably just a problem in the E-Arc, but they made footnotes in the translated text. But the written out footnotes came very late, and by then I didn’t know were they pointed back to!

I gave two stars because I did like the writing style!

Have you read this book? What did you think?