
Title: Turning darkness into light.
Author: Marie Brennan.
Format: E-ARC.
Publisher: Tor Books.
Page count: 245.
Release day: August 20th 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!
This was interesting to read your thoughts!! I had hopes that this would be a good one but it sounds woefully confusing. Such a shame – also, if it’s got that many dragons on the cover I would expect more dragons in the story. Glad I read your thoughts before trying this one out myself.
It was definitely very confusing!
Yes my thoughts exactly, this would not be a good book for a cover buy, very misleading haha!
Thanks 🙂
I’ve been interested in this one, but your review tells me I should probably read the Lady Trent series first. I feel like those background information would make a bit more sense if I do. Anywho, great review, Evelyn!
Yeah I think it will!
Thanks 🙂
Lovely review! I do find the letter style rather odd for a fantasy book. I think there’s another series that does a similar style (Obsidio or something like that). People seem to enjoy that series but the main reason I never picked it up is primarily because I find letter style awkward unless it’s horror / gothic / contemporary (realistic fiction) based.
That’s also a shame about the translation. But half-dragons sound super epic!
In contemporary I love letters/emails! It just doesn’t work for fantasy!
That’s what I thought as well haah, unfortunately it didn’t work for me.. 🙁