Nevernight (The Nevernight Chronicle book 1) by Jay Kristoff (book review).
‘Nevernight’ is book one in ‘The Nevernight Chronicles’ by Jay Kristoff.
This novel follows Mia Corvere going from a 10 year-old living a life of luxury to seeing her father hung, her mother ripped from her along with her baby brother and put into a terrifying oubliette. Mia then has to fight for her life and quickly learn all the skills she will need to be accepted into the Red Church where she will become a trained killer. She does all this to get her revenge on those who killed her family but, along the way, she learns a lot of hard lessons, not all to do with how to kill.
This book can appear confusing but we get lots of different points of view from the same character. So we read from Mia’s present, her past, plus there are footnotes from another point of view. This took me a few pages to get into but, once I was into this and also the writing style, I absolutely loved this book. Talking about the writing style this has been commented on by other readers as something they really didn’t get on with. It is written in a slightly odd way but for some reason it was exactly what I was looking for and I fell into it quite easily. Don’t get me wrong, you do have to get your eye in with the style but I found it lovely to read. I did not want to find myself loving this book as much as I did because I really wanted to go against the hype but I just loved it!
Given this is quite a dark and uncomfortable read in places, it was a lot funnier than I’d expected. There’s a good amount of snark both from Mia and from the footnote writer which I loved. But you really can’t get away from the extreme darkness in this book, these kids are basically at a school where the ones who survive might just get to graduate. They are put through so much to become blades (trained killers) and a lot of them just don’t make it so please do not get attached to anyone in this book.
Having just raved about this book, there was one element in particular that really started to annoy me as the book went on. This was my hatred of the ‘silent scream’. I think almost every character did a silent scream at some point in the book and it just started to grate on me. I’ve personally never been around someone who has done a silent scream and I’m not really sure it’s even possible. Even if it is, there should never be so many silent screams in one book or in one paragraph of a review neither, apologies.
The ending of this book had quite the twist which means I definitely need to keep reading more books in this series.
Sarah Bruch
April 2021
(pub: Thomas Dunn/St.Martin’s Press, 2016. 427 page hardback. Price: £12.99 (UK). ISBN: 978-0-00817-999-1)
check out websites: www.thomasdunn.com and www.stmartins.com
