Book: Dark Of The West by Joanna Hathaway

Published February 2019 by Tor Teen|480 pages

Where I Got It: I own the hardcover

Series: The Glass Alliance #1

Genre: YA Fantasy

He was raised in revolution. She was raised in a palace. Can their love stop a war? Code Name Verity meets The Winner’s Curse in Joanna Hathaway’s Dark of the West, a breathtaking YA fantasy debut.

Aurelia Isendare is a princess of a small kingdom in the North, raised in privilege but shielded from politics as her brother prepares to step up to the throne. Halfway around the world, Athan Dakar, the youngest son of a ruthless general, is a fighter pilot longing for a life away from the front lines. When Athan’s mother is shot and killed, his father is convinced it’s the work of his old rival, the Queen of Etania—Aurelia’s mother. Determined to avenge his wife’s murder, he devises a plot to overthrow the Queen, a plot which sends Athan undercover to Etania to gain intel from her children.

Athan’s mission becomes complicated when he finds himself falling for the girl he’s been tasked with spying upon. Aurelia feels the same attraction, all the while desperately seeking to stop the war threatening to break between the Southern territory and the old Northern kingdoms that control it—a war in which Athan’s father is determined to play a role. As diplomatic ties manage to just barely hold, the two teens struggle to remain loyal to their families and each other as they learn that war is not as black and white as they’ve been raised to believe.

Dark Of The West is another book that sounded interesting but turned out to be just okay.

I was really bored reading it, and I couldn’t quite figure out what Hathaway was going for.  The world itself felt like it was a fantasy, though there are fighter planes and pilots and there seems to be technology.  There’s a lot of politics and war and invasion, and I don’t know if that part made it feel like fantasy or if it just had this World War 2 set in an alternate world feel to it.  It did feel like World War 2, at least a little bit, and I’m wondering if that inspired the author at all.

Names and places were thrown at me, and I felt like I was reading a history textbook with no context.  The places could easily have been solved by referring to the map, but there were so many names that I had trouble keeping track of who was who, and how they were connected to each other.  I don’t know if things will become more clear later on in the series, but I didn’t have the patience or energy to figure things out.

It was a struggle to get through, and by the end, I didn’t really care what happened.  I didn’t particularly care about the characters or the fact that they were torn apart by politics.  Though I couldn’t remember if there was an actual romance, or if we were just building up to it.  Honestly, there’s not a lot I remember, so I couldn’t give a lot of details about this book.

2 stars.  Dark Of The West just wasn’t for me.  I don’t remember enough of it to give it a lower rating, but I also can’t go higher for the same reason.