Lightlark 2: The Worst YA Book Returns With Vengeance

Introduction 

Video version

Here we go again.

Lightlark! A viral tiktok book with very little substance. Look, I don’t think I have to give much backstory here, and if you ever need four to seven hours of explanation, I can suggest a few videos. Lightlark is not worth obsessing over, even as a hater. 

That is why I really do not obsess over it. Rather, it has emerged in my life like a malevolent spectre, coming back a year later to terrorize me for a fitful week before I can again rest. I did not set out to write a four hour review of a bad book last time, I just had 27,000 words to say about it. Here, a year later, with its fame mostly forgotten, I welcome the ghast of Lightlark 2 back inside my body for the sake of entertainment.

After all, I’ve read a lot of people’s comments on the matter over the last year. A lot of people seem very hopeful that tiktok popular kid Alex Aster will have improved and taken the critique her book received to heart. A lot of people seemed to think the first book was Like That just because it was a pet project she’d had since being a teen, and that writing another might force her to have original thoughts.

So I’m here for all you people, and for all the mischievous freaks who enjoy learning about trashfires they never have to actually read: I read Nightbane, and get this, you won’t believe it, but- 

It was exactly as bad as Lightlark.

Let’s see how long it takes me this time.

LightLark Primer

Lightlark has a wonderful ability to be about as expertly weaved as spaghetti. For a book which is often extremely simple and a world mostly borrowed off of fantasy cliches and blatantly SJM’s work, it is extremely difficult to discuss Lightlark’s world. The timeline of tangled curses, lies, powers, and history is at once extremely straight forward to write out, but headache inducing the moment you question any of it. A lot of the times I’ve had to scratch my head and simply go ‘why’, and the answer to why things function as they do… well, it’s rather like understanding the main plotline to Five Nights at Freddy’s at this point, entirely dependent on assuming certain story aspects which are only hinted at in text.

Lightlark’s world and lore, especially as of Nightbane, is very back to front. One of the only ways to understand the puzzle pieces is to realize the characters and premise came first, the lore to justify it later. Nightbane adds a few bits of lore, all of which feels crucially missing from book 1, the biggest hint it was a late addition rather than planned from the start. To help make sense of the plot, I’m going to cover the world and rules upfront including Nightbane spoilers, because trust me this is the best way to do it.

So.

Lightlark! It is an island. It’s an island where once six realms lived together in peace: the sunlings, the moonlings, the starlings, the wildlings, the skylings, and the night… shades. Each kind of person has access to specific magic based on their magic ethnicity, and people only can access one realm’s kind of magic even if they have inter-realm parents. These magical abilities are deeply unbalanced, still, with Skylings controlling breezes and flying while Wildlings can earthbend, control plants, grow a tree in an instant, seduce anyone, create gems, make ultra healing potions, and get special animal familiars. The list of what Nightshade can do is worse, from alter memories to gaze through mirrors to create blackholes to absolutely anything, really.

We get an official map this book. It looks a bit like Europe. I prefer my own.

The six nations are ruled by the sunling king, who is called an ‘Origin’. The Origin, as part of the original founding bloodline of Lightlark, can use powers of all the Realms so long as there’s a significant population density who live on Lightlark. I’m trying to just explain this plainly and already running into one of the many undefined mysteries… there’ll be a lot of those. Look, the Origin can’t use the power of a Wildling if there’s only one on the island, but he can use Starling powers because there’s like two hundred.

One day, five hundred years ago, some drama occurred and a Starling named Aurora/Celeste accidentally unleashed a curse on all the realms and Lightlark itself. These curses were deeply unbalanced and lame but caused a lot of friction. People blamed the curse-magic Nightshades, who had already left the island and now were exiled for good. Same with the Wildlings, who were made to have to consume human hearts to live. In general, the curses made the realms dislike each other and flee the eternally stormy land Lightlark had become and settle Newlands on surrounding islands.

Every 100 years, the storm around Lightlark would clear, and the realms would send their rulers to have a Centennial summit. This was basically a meeting to try and track an obtuse prophecy which was inexplicably framed as some sort of ‘deadly game’. It was not deadly nor a game.

Now, the rulers of Lightlark are special people. A ruler is the most powerful of their magical ethnicity, capable of easy and extreme magic far beyond normal levels. They are also immortal unless killed- or unless they have a child. This is because ‘ruler power’ is in some ways a finite resource, keeping one person alive forever but aging when split between children and descendants. Ruler power is, sort of, also connected to the people: if a ruler dies without a heir to continue the bloodline, all people in their kingdom will also die. This has never happened, but everyone knows it to be true.

In Nightbane, we get some answers about why these rules are the way they are. It turns out the original founder of Lightlark worked with a Nightshade to weave a powerful, secret curse called ‘Nexus’- a very poor choice of name for a curse, by the way. The Nexus curse is why people die if their ruler dies, binding the people’s lives to their sovereign so they can never rebel. This twist on the divine right of kings is actually a cool one, so it’s a shame this lore is about one paragraph long in the book and never comes up again after its late introduction.

Still, we know the Nexus curse is also why people can only have one power even if they have dual-heritage, and why an Origin- as the bloodline of the first king- is exempt from this.

There isn’t an easy transition for it, but next up we have Love Bonds. They’re officially called that now, though I think before we didn’t have a technical term. In this world, if you love someone they are able to access your powers, even using those powers against you or stealing them permanently. We have very little information on regular use and abuse of this feature, as we only see it from the very unique POV of the lead, but it’s another interesting but squandered concept. Do people sense their love bonds? Only sometimes. Can anyone in love do this? Probably, but maybe not. Do people steal powers all the time? Apparently never, despite that being the plan of our lead in the first book. Is it only romantic love?

Interestingly, I have a quote on that.

Isla shook her head. “I don’t understand. I can feel it. You love me. Why- why won’t you touch me?” She had tried to touch him multiple times- he tried to kiss him, to get close to him, to make clear what she wanted. Every time, he had rejected her. The realization came at last like a sword hilt to the temple. “Are you- are you not attracted to me?”

He said nothing, and she suddenly felt ridiculous. Of course he could love her without wanting her in that way. Various shades of love existed. She was so stupid, so foolish for just assuming-

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Isla here is being a true asexual ally, but this sort of backwards justification- almost directly in response to people asking but is it inclusive– is not as helpful as it seems. Various shades of love exist! Great. But wait, is a love bond actually something that can be platonic or familial?

The answer is, well, no. If platonic love was enough to create a power-sharing love bond, the climax of the first book no longer functions. That, SIGH, revolved around the villain ensuring via love bonds that the lead would have access to all six realms’ power at once, so she could harvest it for herself. The villain was pretending to be the lead’s best friend for most of the book, with a loving sisterly platonic bond. If this power stuff was transient over friendships, Aurora would have had access to all the realms’ powers without needing to physically harvest it with the Bondmaker. Probably. I had to revisit Lightlark to write this review, and lads, it really is a mess.

Beyond though the specific use of platonic love in the first book, if love bonds and power sharing were a common facet of life like friendship is, we’d just see it more than just this one mention. People have usually more than one friend and they usually love those friends just as fiercely as a romantic partner. Now imagine having a great group chat makes you all into extremely powerful magic users who can borrow abilities at will. We could restructure society around these uber-friendship-polycules!

Basically though, my point is that Isla bringing up ‘shades of love’ is a useless bit of inclusion when there is no visible evidence of the case. All we ever see or hear of love bonds is through Isla’s horny heterosexual ass. She’s accepting the notion Oro might be asexual, which, three cheers for that! But god damn it he better be alloromantic.

Oh, and don’t worry, he IS interested in sex, as the quote continues.

Oro had her pressed against the wall before she could say another word. He was looming over her, eyes filled with a burning intensity that made heat pool everywhere. “Isla,” he said. “Attracted does not begin to describe what I feel for you.”

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And admittedly, it’s probably best they didn’t make the losing love interest asexual.

Going back to our timeline stroll, we get to the first book’s events. I’m able to luckily skip explaining most of it, as much of it never is mentioned in Nightbane.

Our lead is Isla, the Wildling ruler whose name I always pronounce accurately. She is about twenty years old and has no powers, a secret which had made her mentors squirrel her away from the public eye as much as possible. Her life is secretly very arranged: her father was a Nightshade general and her mother was the Wildling queen. Aurora the villain had her parents killed so that Isla could be raised according to her evil plan, to attend the fifth Centennial under instructions to seduce Oro, the king of Lightlark. Aurora would then harvest all six realms’ power from Isla for a goal which quite literally was never made clear.

Isla, however, a year before the Centennial gained access to a magical artifact she calls her starstick, which allows her to teleport randomly around the world. She meets Grim, the current Nightshade ruler, and they begin an enemies to lovers relationship before the plot of the first book. Grim, also lied to by Aurora, is aware of Isla’s plan to seduce Oro and that Oro can sense lies, so he forcibly removes all her memories of their relationship right before the Centennial begins. Why can Oro sense lies? Well, that’s because there’s something called ‘Flairs’, which are uncommon abilities passed rarely through family lines, in addition to the fact most people manifest their magic uniquely anyway. Oro can sense lies, Grim can teleport, and Isla winds up being immune to curses.

Grim then seduces Isla all over again while lying to her, a deeply creepy move, and she genuinely forms feelings for Oro, ending the book by dissing Grim and picking Oro. He warns her when she recalls her past, she’ll return to him. The book ends with Isla realizing her crown is a key to a secret door, and just opening the door…

But okay, wait, while we’re still in the set up primer, there’s actually more stuff to cover. For one, Lightlark is not a world only inhabited by humans. There’s magical beings everywhere, usually unhelpfully referred to as ‘creatures’ or ‘ancient creatures’. These include mermaids, spectres, giant snakes, shapeshifters, blue winged freaks, dragons, and more. In many ways Lightlark wants to be a high fantasy with whimsy and expansive systems beyond just ‘people with magic’, but the ancient creatures all feel like scattered random encounters who have decided being cryptic and unhelpful is their only joy in life.

The ancient creatures hint at coming from elsewhere, of being older than Lightlark, and Nightbane expands that with its biggest wasted lore addition yet: it turns out Lightlark itself is like, a pocket world formed by people over a thousand years ago from a much bigger plane. Why they left and what the original world was like is not yet known, but it’s certainly an… interesting direction. As usual, the book introduces it and then no one comments or wonders about the implications, moving past the lore drop until next book when Aster has actually thought of some answers.

I have a feeling I’ll be returning to edit this section as I go, but that’s the primer. Now you know your Lightlark basics. Let me walk you through the plot. 

Plot

The first thing you need to know about Nightbane is that it immediately denies you the cliffhanger Lightlark ended on and only returns to what is behind the damn door on page 361 of 400.

The second is that, while not divided into parts, it ought to be. Much like the book before, the plot is extremely scattershot, introducing ideas or subplots that are resolved with a paragraph 200 pages later and constantly throwing in time skips or addressing things off page. Concepts are introduced, like ‘is Isla is a good ruler’, and then they are resolved only by the narrative skipping over her action and dialogue to tell us ‘she did good ruler things’. There’s almost no effort at cohesion of any kind and the plot itself is as loose a framework as a NaNoWriMo pantser. To talk about it succinctly- I mean, what am I going to do, make this ten hours?- I need to rearrange the order of some events away from what the book literally presents. Bunch the storylines together. It’s a mammoth job which should really have been the editor’s task, not mine.

Oro

At the end of the last book, Isla and Oro realized they were in love, and both seemed… mutely surprised by this. 

The fact he could access her abilities meant she loved him.

Though she didn’t even know what that- love- was.

She had loved her guardians.

She had loved Celeste.

She had, at some point, loved Grim.

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Isla very much has a point here, and right to wonder. I wonder how love bonds work too, girl! Love is a very complex idea, so how is she supposed to reckon with it in a world where it can be so tangible? 

She’s also just stressed. Grim’s reveal of their past forgotten relationship and his weird grooming continues to bother her, as does pretty much everything. When she and Oro attempt to open the McGuffin door, shadow power blasts her back, and she has a vision of Grim surrounded by blackened corpses, which she takes as prophetic. While prophecy exists in this world, and there’s even an Oracle frozen in a block of ice nearby, it’s not touched on why everyone accepts the magically locked Isla was gifted a random prophetic vision. (It turns out, by the way, to not be a vision of the future but a memory).

While she fears Grim and tries to understand her relationship to Oro, Isla feels overwhelmed with her duties to the two realms she’s wound up with and her place in the world. She’s going through her very own depression arc! And while it’s not written carelessly in regards to mental health, it also is a very specific angle of it- the very aspirational trauma conquering style that SJM is so extremely fond of, where Isla is able to simply stop being depressed thanks to a hot boy and deciding not to be.

Oro and Isla hold a meeting of the rulers and their representatives to discuss the newly uncursed world and future of the island of Lightlark. After the events of last book though, that really only means Isla, Oro, and Azul- Grim is now a distant enemy and Moonling Cleo is too mysteriously bitchy to attend but sends some random guy. A new Starling is introduced, Maren, who serves as the Starling representative. Isla, remember, is the ruler of Starling after stealing Aurora’s ruling powers last book. 

Nightbane enjoys a council meeting. Or, I suppose, enjoys isn’t the right word. It has council meetings, a lot of them, but mostly out of an obligation to pretend it has any political depths. The representatives discuss news like the fact Skylings are flying with hang-gliders and there’s a rebellion happening, but it’s all very surface level. At one point the Moonling representative quizzes Isla on her realm.

After the curses, Isla had injected power into her lands, to save her people while she recovered. Late at night, with her portaling device, she had visited them in secret. “Wildlings have begun shifting their primary food source.” She saw clear disgust on Soren’s face, which she had guessed had to do with the fact her people had previously subsisted on human hearts. “My people have already started harvesting their own crops, but we will need aid to achieve an assortment of diet and agriculture now that they are dependent on farming. I-”

“How many are you left?” Soren interrupted.

She frowned. “I’m not sure. As you know-”

“You’re not sure?” Soren asked, eyebrow raised.

She could feel her face go hot. It was a reasonable question. The kind a good ruler would know the answer to.

“Do most of your people know how to wield power?”

“I don’t know.”

“How is housing? What has the rate of reproduction been in the last century?”

“I will have to find out,” she said through her teeth.

“Do you-”

“Enough,” Oro said.

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The storyline of Isla’s qualifications to rule is an interesting one. It’s one I’m for, but it’s also clear it’s very surface-deep. Soren here is both asking fair enough questions, but is also being needlessly pedantic. I suppose part of me thinks this is a response to people trying to be meticulous picking apart her world building, like working out how many hearts the wildlings would need to live… the author feeling the need to address that ruling a kingdom is a complex thing, but that asking a bunch of questions is just irritating.

But goddamn it, is it really so rude to expect a consistent world capable of functioning outside what the plot demands? No, it doesn’t really matter the housing of the Wildlings or their reproductive rates. But it does matter that they apparently need help to learn how to farm. They have plant magic which on Isla’s extreme scale of power can grow a tree from seed to hundreds of years old in an instant. A powerful Wildling should be capable of growing a pumpkin, and a low magic Wildling probably has a green thumb! This also confirms Wildlings apparently used to dine exclusively on human hearts, as they have no apparent knowledge of harvesting crops and require help to vary their diets, suggesting they also haven’t been hunting for food.

I don’t expect Isla to necessarily have all the answers, but it’s clear the author is the one who simply doesn’t know these things and doesn’t care.

Also at the meeting, the new Starling representative Maren brings up a key worldbuilding fact which has up until never come up. Slavery.

“For centuries, we have been an afterthought. A blip in your ancient lives. We have been treated as disposable by many. Taken in the middle of the night. Subjected to labor, and torture, and sometimes worse.” She looked at the king. “You executed those found guilty, but so many fell through the cracks.” She grimaced. “Star isle is in ruins. I can’t imagine the newland is faring much better.” She looked to Isla. “We need a ruler.”

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This is a ludicrous introduction. As poorly defined as Lightlark’s worldbuilding has always been, the idea that all of last book there was a severe issue of everyone raiding Starlings to take as slaves and it never came up is impossible. Isla’s best friend was Celeste/Aurora, the Starling ruler, and Isla starstick’d her way all around the newlands. Yet hearing this now, she… mostly doesn’t react or seem to care, as usual, but certainly wasn’t aware of it.

There’s even the fact Maren thanks Oro for dealing with the slavers in the last few weeks like they were ever an established issue. And I will continue to call it slavery, though the book never does- literally what other term is there for people being abducted and exploited like that? The book will continue on with this issue pretty much one other time, near the end, and never resolve or address it at all. An unspecified group of people for hundreds of years took Starlings as slaves- I don’t even want to know how impossibly that breaks the math on their population- and no one talks about it.

It’s the same as the rebellion plotline brought up here in the first meeting.

“There is something else. Rebellion on the island is brewing. Our spies have heard the whispers, carried along the wind.”

Oro frowned. “What do those whispers say?”

“The people are not pleased with how long it took to break the curses, or our decisions as rulers.”

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People are unhappy. Are they doing anything? Are there riots, protests, angry letters? What do people want? What decisions do they disapprove of?

We will never learn. This is a plotline about rebellion in only an obligatory way, just as apparently introducing slavery into the world is. It will come up about two more times and have no significant impact on anything in the story. This is the depth of pretty much everything in Aster’s writing, but these two examples come right after another and illustrate it well.

After being chewed out by the others, Isla is upset she isn’t fit to rule and doesn’t know how, so she speaks with Azul. Our unproblematic king tells her ruling is hard and a ruler must serve their people. He also suggests her people may put pressure on her to have an heir soon, even though in this world that is a process which would begin to immediately kill her. She decides to be officially coronated as the ruler of the Starlings with a ceremony, and I’m going to have far too many quotes this video, aren’t I? So often it feels like saying ‘it is badly written’ isn’t enough.

First she heads to Wildling newlands to meet her people.

She told them everything else. That she believed she’d been born without powers. That she had a device that allowed her to portal at will. That she now had Starling power.

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As much as recapping known information can be tedious, it also can often be a good character building moment. How Isla feels saying these secrets out loud, if people in the audience react, if there’s any questions or even how she phrases it- but instead it is all skipped over. This happens a lot in Nightbane in order to make room for more Grim fanservice later.

The ‘Isla learning to rule’ plotline is one that could be interesting, just as the ‘Isla is depressed’ and ‘Isla doesn’t know what love is’ plotlines all could be interesting and good directions for the book to pursue. All of them will be cut extremely short. When Isla comes to her island to ask her people if they need anything, they literally just go ‘no, we’re good, go do other stuff’. It’s really convenient really that Isla can get the points of being a good leader without having to ever solve or address any problems directly.

The coronation scene is where the plot begins. As Oro crowns her as the official ruler of the Starlings, a rift opens up nearby Lightlark castle, and a bunch of lizard demons fly out of it and attack. Isla can’t use her powers to defend herself, but does briefly make some sort of connection, a moment of recognition, with one of the drek. Then they disperse. When the rulers gather to discuss the attack, Cleo calls them ‘dreks’ and everyone agrees it was probably Grim’s doing.

Not long after, Grim attacks at another party, and makes his plot-defining statement known:

“Consider this a warning,” It [his voice] said. “A glimpse at the future. You have one month to vacate the island. In thirty days, I am coming to destroy it.”

Shouts. Screams.

“Nothing will be left. You can choose to flee to your newlands… or join me in a new future. The choice is simple. Fighting is futile. The ruin coming is inevitable.”

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Isla begins her training, and visits a blue Ancient Creature from last book, who is able to instantly unlock her powers of Wildling and Nightshade. This sends her into FlashBack Corner, a section I’ll separate and talk about later as a whole. The next 350 pages of the book are often interrupted by long flashback chapters of Isla and Grim’s relationship in chronological order, sometimes having some relevance to whatever is happening in the present. I’ll again circle back later, but that’s going on from this point on.

Isla manages her training relatively easily while also dealing with her and Oro’s relationship issues.

Oro is, technically, a character. He’s okay. Much of his role in the first half of the story is to counter Isla’s depression arc, affirm her feelings, and then be utterly shafted by Grim later. As much as I’d like to like Oro in theory, it’s impossible to get over the looming knowledge he isn’t long for the world. He has more scenes, they even have a hint of pleasant teasing, of the notion he could be an appealing romantic lead- yet it is impossible to ignore the book’s obsession with Grim and his endgame status. Even while Isla and Oro culminate their romantic arc in the first half, she’s having sexy dreams about Grim. It’s unfair.

But just because I liked them in theory, it’s true this is still Nightbane, and Oro’s romance still feels very paint by numbers. Imagine your OTP wrote this book. Take this section:

She pressed her lips against another smile. “Do I encompass any other favorites? Am I your… favorite liar? Favorite incapable ruler?” Her tone soon became bitter, because in truth, she couldn’t imagine being anyone’s favorite anything. “Your favorite weakling who can’t go a few hours without retching?”

Oro turned to her, then. He looked her right in the eyes as he said, “Isla. You are my favorite everything.”

[Isla is insecure more].

She nodded, and it didn’t do anything to make her head feel better. Before he could respond, she added, “Do you wish I wasn’t… everything I am?”

[…] “No, Isla,” he finally said. “It’s the parts you don’t seem to like about yourself that I love the most.”

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Aw! What did he mean by this.

This is superficially cute dialogue reassuring Isla’s low self esteem at the time, but it feels cobbled together from something else. I had to cut sections for being succinct, but when Oro refers to ‘the parts Isla doesn’t like’, he is either referring to her being a weak incompetent ruling liar or something something entirely unstated.

It’s just too easy to fill in the gaps and understand the romantic meaning of ‘I like what you hate about yourself’. Isla hasn’t actually listed the sorts of traits that justifies that line- this isn’t about her talking too much or being too blunt. She has expressed insecurity, and Oro has rebounded to tell her everything she’s worried about is something he loves… not that it isn’t something to worry about at all.

It suggests something Nightbane in general struggles with, which is a commitment to its tropes and cliches at the expense of actually having those tropes make sense. It’d be very easy to tweak their conversation to make Oro’s line make sense, but it doesn’t actually in canon, it only sounds nice. Most things in Nightbane function off the exact same principle: this is an idea seen somewhere else, inserted crudely in, and it kinda sounds nice on a quick glance.

Oro here exists to prop Isla up, train her, tell her to love herself so she can get over her anxieties. I don’t hate some of the words here on her mental health, but it feels hollow and obligatory, never fleshed out into much of a theme. Especially because she soon gets over it.

With Oro.

“I… I don’t want to rule. I don’t want my life tied with thousands of others. I don’t want to have all this responsibility.” She shook her head. “And I know that makes me selfish and awful, and I have no right to be so upset, but I am. I want a life, Oro. Worse than all that is I don’t deserve any of this power. I am no one.”

“You are not no one,” he said steadily. “You are Isla Crown, and you are the most powerful person in all the realms.”

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Oro continues with a very long monologue I’ve slightly trimmed.

“Love, you seem under some delusion you are anything less than extraordinary. Who did that to you? Your guardians? Did they make you feel like nothing would ever be good enough? Or was it him?” Grim. The woods heated with his anger. “Tell me, Isla. Did someone else break the curses? Am I mistaken? […] Damn the vault. Damn the powers. You had nothing, and you broke the curses. You are the key. You see that, don’t you? We were broken before you came. With you, we were saved. You are not a poison, Isla,” he said, his voice filled with intensity. “You were the cure.”

[…He continues]

“I wish you could see yourself the way I do. You would never doubt yourself again.”

Isla closed her eyes. What if she tried to believe him? What if she put the negative thoughts to rest once and for all?

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Oro’s page long monologue on the greatness of Isla is heartwarming stuff. You can understand the desire for this narrative. It is nice to think of someone looking at abuse and giving you a long lecture about how wonderful you are. WHO HURT YOU?! Indeed, I understand the want for it.

But we are talking more in broad narratives for a book here, not a POV imagine. This is the turning point on Isla having depression and trauma: she simply stops.

There isn’t actually a correct answer to writing a mental health journey, only very wrong ones. For a lot of people, it is a loved one they are able to cling to while getting back on their feet, and positive thinking may be a factor. Someone out there has definitely been able to think ‘I’m just going to stop having bad thoughts’ and pulled it off, I won’t deny it.

But this resolution to the plot line, with that out of the way, isn’t great. Mental health issues don’t generally cease no matter how hard you will them to, and her acceptance of her flaws comes from a hot boy rather than soul searching. Isla at the same time is training and attempting to do her job as a ruler, but her catharsis here is just around the fact her boyfriend thinks she’s perfect. It doesn’t feel like an honest portrayal of character growth when it is narrated so explicitly by the romantic lead. Does she accept herself, really, or does she just accept everyone around her telling her she’s the most special girl ever?

Does Oro listen to her here, or does she just tell her she’s perfect and that’s enough?

Side Plot Roundup.

At this point I’ve covered most of the core of the first half of the book, while skipping a very large amount of side plots.

I’ve been playing a lot of a video game called, uh, Pathfinder: Kingmaker lately. In it, you run a kingdom while also being an adventuring party. You often have a deadline for the main plot while juggling side quests with characters and exploring new locations for resources that will help you progress.

NightBane is exactly like Kingmaker. Don’t quote me on that.

There’s the rebellion subplot: they abduct Isla early on, communicate nothing, and she escapes. There’s her helping the Starlings: it is said she helps arrange supplies, and that’s it. There’s her in Wildling arranging the same nebulous help.

Like, I must stop to put in yet another quote of this.

By the time the volunteers left, the Wildlings had their homes fixed, a steady food supply, new skills, and resources. Isla decided to stay behind for a couple of days, to spend time with her people. […]

She got to know each of the Wildlings in the village and ventured to other settlements close by. Wren took Isla into the forest and taught her a few Wildling wielding techniques, including stances, arm movements, and uses of ability. They spoke for hours.

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Just such lazy writing! Anyway. She sidequests.

She’s there in Starling meeting Maren and her cousin Cinder who has strong powers. She gets a special magical animal to ride into battle, she hears about ‘special ore’ capable of harming Dreks. She talks to Ancient Creatures on if they’ll help fight Grim at the end of the month and she orders healing elixirs made from magical flowers the Wildlings are perpetually running out of and then finding more growing. She is assigned a set of twin bodyguards and meets Oro’s circle of friends. She talks to Cleo.

All of this feels abrupt. The chapters often begin in media res and end in media res. Often a character will end the scene by dramatically flying/teleporting/getting swept to sea mid conversation. The topic being discussed then won’t appear for several chapters to almost the entire book later.

Stuff like this makes it very difficult to really know where to start.

First, Lynx. The book has lazy chapter titles, a pet peeve, where chapter titles simply refer to something said within the chapter or a general concept present. Nothing artsy. So chapter Lynx rolled up, and I rolled my eyes.

This is the chapter where Isla learns she should have a bonded animal companion as all Wildlings apparently do, and goes on a swamp quest to spiritually connect with her cool animal friend. A bunch of weird freaks show up, like a wolf made of plants, a spider with ten foot legs, and a bear with horns, but Isla’s winds up being a ten foot tall cat.

A cat named Lynx.

Who is not a lynx.

Lynx is a black leopard. Also known as a panther, though the book doesn’t call him that- presumably to avoid the aesthetic clash of Isla’s mentor also having a bonded panther.

All girls want a giant panther to ride into battle, so Lynx is cool and all from that point of view. He was once her mother’s, so we can blame her for the naming. Lynx does not do much or get much focus, it just feels like an obligatory cool thing for her to have. Later he gets armor fitted, which gave me the throwaway line which personally damaged me the most.

It even had small holes for his pointed ears and a place for her to sit.

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Panthers do not. Have pointed ears.

Is it really, really, that difficult an ask to look at an image of an animal before you attempt to describe it?

Next thing of note, the rebellion plotline. I’ve already said it goes nowhere and isn’t fleshed out, but I’d be entirely remiss if I didn’t note they specifically wear beige because of the whole ‘people only wear the colors of their realm’ thing. I’ve dubbed them thus ‘The Khaki Rebellion’ and they are all my favorite characters.

Then there’s the matter of new characters. There’s a joke made about the oddness of Oro having friends, but he sure does. They fill out later council meetings but never feel distinct. The most notable is Enya, a lesbian fire bender who has a convenient love for micromanaging complex economic and political matters so Isla doesn’t have to. Enya is first mentioned like this:

“Enya, Urn, and Helios join me”, he said.

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Which isn’t notable at all except for how funny I find those three names juxtaposed. My three well named children whose naming conventions are all logically consistent: the singer Enya, a burial vessel, and the Greek god of the sun.

The next set of new characters are Ciel and Avel, the Skyling twin bodyguards. Twin bodyguards sure is an oddly popular trope, huh? These two do absolutely nothing, let alone speak with personality. Often they fly above Isla wherever she is. At the very end of the book one of them dies and I’m genuinely unsure if even Aster thinks a reader would care.

The next friends are introduced together, so I will. They are both extremely tall men, a Moonling and a Skyling. Calder is buff but kind, I guess, and Zed is basically sonic the hedgehog, down to his blue hair. Neither commands any attention or prominence as the story unfolds.

What we do have when we combine Oro’s friends, however, is a sort of ‘friend group’. It certainly is an effort at one, to make the book feel less empty. When they were first introduced, I had hope for this obvious ACOTAR Inner Circle rip off- down to the two hot male BFFs and the lesbian troubled bad ass- but the book did not share my feelings. They are simply not used so that Grim’s Sexy Flashback Fest can continue to dominate the page count.

The last notable character isn’t part of Oro’s friends but does show up in council meetings. The Starling Maren is basically running the show, especially as we only see Isla deal with Starling issues once or twice. She has a bit more depth to her backstory and history, especially with the whole slavery inclusion to the lore lexicon. She has a very talented child cousin she’s had to shelter and she wants nothing more than to ensure the future of her people. She turns out to be the leader of the Khaki Rebellion later on.

Maren still isn’t, and you can say it with me, really a character. She functions in the world and fits in it a bit more than like, Calder or Avel, but she has no chance to feel more human than plot function. It’s always obvious at any given time in NightBane that the book is desperate to move on to the next Grim scene.

You might think Maren being the Khaki Leader might introduce some conflict, such at the fact the rebellion is unhappy with the system of rulers, but it doesn’t. Maren looks to Isla and her cursebreaking abilities as a sign of hope, and Ella- Isla’s Starling maid from last book whose job now has unfortunate implications- similarly praises Isla.

“All of us [Starlings] grew up accepting that our lives would be short and likely miserable. Few of us had any dreams. Or goals. Or hope. You gave us a chance to live. To most of us, you are a god. A savior.”

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I’ll talk about the Khakis and their actual goal later on, why it depends on Isla. What matters now is that Maren similarly thinks of Isla as her hope, and so the whole rebellion threat is entirely removed. It’s just a miscommunication, really.

(Also, the use of lower case god: no, we have no answers or hints of any sort of religious system in this world still. The cursed abbey with its four symbol-having windows is even included on the world map but never mentioned.)

Next up on the side track, Cleo. In Lightlark, she just fit the character type of mean girl, not actually contributing much to the plot in the end but a constant mild hindrance. In Nightbane, Cleo very barely features at all, and when she does she drops this doozy.

“I heard you were locked in a glass box of a room. Is that true?” Cleo asked. Where was she going with that? How did she even know that? Isla nodded warily and watched as Cleo turned back toward the moon. She stared at it as she said, “You are just a young fool, but you remind me so much of him.” Isla could have imagined it, but Cleo’s voice cracked with emotion, splitting from its normal coolness. “My son.”

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Cleo explains she had a secret son who she kept locked up constantly, and who still died to the Moonling curse somehow. I’ve covered the old Moonling curse, how the ocean killed people but in never specified ways, and this is the same. I guess it’d be morbid for Cleo to discuss how her son died in an ocean-cursed locked room mystery, but also, how did he die? Did the ocean unlock his bedroom door and beat him to death?

Cleo now has motivation she formally lacked, though it’s a confusing one. She skipped last Centennial because of her son, and we later learn she believes in the Other World everyone in Lightlark came from, where the dead will live again, including her son. She vaguely talks about helping Isla but ultimately joins Grim’s side on going to destroy Lightlark for her son.

It also really re-frames Cleo. No longer is she a generic mean girl jealous of Isla. Now she’s apparently a grieving MILF bitching at a child who reminds her of her dead son.

Huh.

Still in our side quest eternity, there’s also another prophecy in this book! I have little to say on the subject. An oracle unfreezes herself to tell Isla her memories are the key, and that when the oracle is about to die she’ll tell Isla more prophetic things. Neither of these prophecies are as confusing and drawn out as the Centennial one, instead being more vague statements rather than poetic predictions.

In truth, it’d be easy to continue with side quests like this. The book mostly is that, and dividing it into ‘part one’ and ‘part two’ is something I’m doing arbitrarily, not how the book is arranged.

The book is arranged badly.

At this point though, we’ll pretend there’s structure, and we’ll pretend we’re at part two- where I’ll discuss Grim and the climax and mostly, mainly, Grim.

Part 2

Grim’s flashback extravaganza

The flashbacks begin in this book about 50 pages in and continue the whole way through, with chapters all titled ‘Before’ sometimes even occurring twice in a row. Isla constantly ends her present chapters by falling unconscious or suddenly remembering a flashback, and in total there are about 22 flashback chapters. They tend to be longer than other chapters, which are sometimes only a page and a half, and they are where Nightbane’s true passions lie.

The flashbacks tell the story of Grim and Isla’s romance in chronological order and with few time skips over their activities- we see the majority of events that define their entire relationship up to the exact point he wipes all her memories before book 1.

When people wanted Lightlark, they wanted these flashbacks. It is pure cliché, a standardized enemies to lovers paint by numbers with every other trope the author fancied thrown in. Nothing in it feels new- it feels like fanfiction. They bicker, they get in sexually charged situations, they tend to each other’s wounds, rinse and repeat nonstop. I’m sure the few fans this series had devoured these chapters.

From the perspective of a reader, not a fan, these chapters are meant to teach us about Isla, teach us about Grim, help us understand why he is so devoted to her… and why she apparently once was too. We are meant to see Isla in a different light by the end. Most importantly, we are meant to love Grim more.

While the flashbacks begin when Oro and Isla are still in their romantic arc, she very rarely discusses them with him or anyone. Or herself. The flashbacks get more frequent at the book goes on, especially after Oro has ended his romantic arc with Isla: they say they love each other, he fingers her, they barely interact romantically again. At no point when reading Isla and Grim’s scenes together can you doubt they are endgame.

It begins like The Selection. Isla portals in- she says portal device much more than starstick this book- to the Nightshade Palace. She is swept into another room and given red lipstick and a sexy dress. She’s put in a group of other girls despite looking extremely out of place, and Grim instantly has a boner for her. He takes her to his room and starts to kiss her. It turns out this is his not-harem, and he’s trying to conceive an heir (right before the Centennial?), but he’s not allowed to sleep with the same woman more than once. He assumes she’s there to be, uh, bred, and she suddenly freaks out and stabs him.

What a meet-cute! It’s strange how something as wacky as ‘selected to be impregnated by the evil king but stabbing him teehee’ feels… very cliché to me. The scenario might be slightly different, but this is the same sort of ‘put lead girl in sexually vulnerable position so the male lead can want her, then show she’s not like other girls with violence’ writing that I’m extremely used to. The flashbacks will come back to that basic formula a lot, by the way.

Grim arrives in Isla’s room to chew her out for stabbing him, and chokes and throws her around until she gets a dagger to his throat and orders him out. He shows a particular interest in her starstick and its portaling abilities, as it turns out he was its original creator. He never corrects her on its name, but does sneer when she refers to it as her ‘starstick’. We also still never receive a description for what this beloved possession she constantly uses looks like.

She returns to the Nightshade palace and his bedroom in order to offer him a Wildling healing elixir, as he allowed her to keep the starstick and feels in his debt. When she hears multiple people approach the bedroom, she hides in his en suite giant waterfall bathtub, a circumstance that of course leads to him discovering her when he’s naked and about to bathe.

He also has giant hands. While I’m here, he has extremely big yaoi hands. In general Grim and every other man in this world is gigantic, seemingly an unaddressed extreme sexual dimorphism. Last book we didn’t hear so much about how tall and big the love interests were, this book it’s nonstop. I personally blame author of The Love Hypothesis.

He was frowning down at the vial, which looked laughably small in his hand.

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He roughly took her hand. His hands were freezing. Enormous.

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She tries to remove any ill will between them and he’s a jerk, so she challenges him to a duel. She’s fairly well matched against his 500 years of warlord experience and tricks him into some quicksand, which he sinks into still swinging his giant sword. He then throws her in the sand and leaves dramatically. In the present, Isla realizes Grim must have on purpose let her win at the Centennial last book, a revelation surely unrelated to the fact readers made fun of Isla being able to beat him last book.

Next, we see Isla visiting Nightshade marketplace in search of the skin gloves that were minorly important in Lightlark. While there, we get a sense of Nightshade culture and society.

Women wore clothes she had never seen in other realms’ lands- boots that reached their thighs, dresses with chain mail woven through, pants that were glossy and shimmering. Compared to them, Isla was wearing far too much clothing.

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Rather than sneak around what will become clear, the vision of Nightshade here is both an uninspiring den of edgy dark sin and also just one to one the Night Court from ACOTAR by SJM. I do not like SJM or ACOTAR, but the inspiration and borrowing is extremely obvious in both Lightlark and Nightbane- and with Nightshade, Aster has made her imitation even more blatant. Down to the badass sexy leather pants women get to wear.

Someone at the market is selling a potion called ‘Nightbane’, our title drop which is entirely meaningless at this point.

Isla tours the wacky street of spooky sellers until she is harassed by a man and runs away. She’s intercepted by Grim, of course.

Grim arrests her and taunts her a bit before offering her a deal: if she helps him find a sword he refuses to give her any details on, he won’t kill her and he’ll help her vaguely at the Centennial. We don’t need to go into the fact ‘helping at the centennial’ is exactly the same as not helping at the centennial, because the Centennial isn’t actually the hunger games it’s just a 100 day brainstorming session. But whatever. We have our obligatory connection despite the fact they both seem to hate each other. Oh, and Isla is yet again- as she often is- wearing a very thin nightgown so Grim can mock and ogle her at the same time.

Grim takes Isla to visit The Blacksmith, an Ancient Creature who lives on an isolated island atop a bunch of sharp rocks you have to hand climb, who goes feral at the smell of blood. The whole sequence here is extremely odd and out of place even for a book which has had a fair bit of magical creatures in it.

Isla obviously cuts her hand, and the Blacksmith chases her like the weird giant ghoul man he is while Grim promptly fucks off to leave her. He saves her again at the last minute and reveals he orchestrated her getting hurt and hunted because he was curious to test her. He interviews the Blacksmith, who says the sword Grim is hunting was stolen a long time ago. Grim removes the Blacksmith’s memories and they depart. The whole episode progressed or explained surprisingly little for introducing a giant inhuman bone-smith ghoul man who makes magic weapons.

For something that is one timeline in chronological order, Grim’s flashbacks still feel a lot like the sidequests that make up the rest of Nightbane. Off-page, Grim figures out the next step and conveniently portals Isla wherever they need to go. There’s no sense of accomplishment, and certainly up until the point he needs a non-Nightshade to pick up the sword, Isla is entirely superfluous to his plans.

On their next outing, Grim reveals he has a necklace which makes him immune to all curses.

Wait, huh? I am fairly certain during the course of Lightlark Grim never went outside in the night so this isn’t solving a mistake, it’s just a decision to give Grim even more overpowered abilities. He has a magic necklace of curse immunity. This book we learn magic objects are made by people by infusing their abilities into specific items, so a curse-immune friend of his made it for him.

Grim’s curse immune necklace will not be important or mentioned for the rest of the book.

The pair head to a sort of Skyrim dungeon of a generic thief hangout, where Grim goes to murder the top floor while Isla kills the bottom. One thief suddenly comes out of nowhere. Uh oh! Isla is entirely overpowered and threatened with rape! This one she gets out of herself by jumping out a window and landing on the man. And so the book is officially feminist.

Grim has kept one of the thieves alive and begins to torture him by cutting off limbs until he agrees to speak. Grim then kills him anyway.

In between their adventures, Isla decides to venture out to Wildling. She’s immediately overpowered and captured by some Wildlings who nearly saw out her heart until she’s able to use her starstick and flee to Grim’s palace.

He fetches her a healing elixir and gives her hot chocolate while she heals up. He discusses Nightbane with her, revealing it is an addictive drug that gives euphoria while slowly killing. I got extremely nervous here for a classic ‘fantasy drug abuse’ arc, my absolute be-loathed, but at least it’s not that. Grim then starts to talk about pain is good for you, and some more sirens went off in my head. There’s a lot of sirens in my head, really, reading this book.

Grim looked down. It seemed to surprise them both when he said, “When I was seven, my training consisted of being cut and skinned until there was barely any flesh on my back.”

Isla’s jaw went slack. Her training could be painful… but to do that to a child? “That is barbaric.”

He only lifted a shoulder. “It was a custom here, for a very long time. Meant to toughen the body and mind at the height of its growth. The place I trained as a warrior… we were punished for the smallest of infractions. In public. Shadows can turn into the sharpest, thinnest blades.”

“That’s humiliating.”

“It wasn’t. It was a chance to prove we didn’t react to the pain. Standing there, being cut, and not moving a muscle in your face… it was seen as strength.” His eyes weren’t on her when he said, “My father would come and watch. It was an honor to show him I had no reaction to the pain.”

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First, Isla scoffing at child abuse like she wasn’t literally breaking her arms hanging from tree branches at age 12. Okay girl.

Ah, Grim trauma-dumping. Is it okay if I say I’m extremely tired of this? This is the case for every brooding villain type like Grim, a convenient backstory where they are a victim to such an extreme degree it feels rude to not give them some slack. No one is saying ‘oh, you must forgive Grim because he’s just been abused and doesn’t know love!’ but we all understand that is the broader use of this narrative, right? I dislike clowning too hard on abuse narratives, but this level of literally being skinned alive at 7 in public to impress your dad is ludicrous. This is the sort of backstory you write when you’re 12, and this is the sort of backstory we’ve been seeing time and again for abusive bad boys like Grim. It’s not original, it’s not compelling, and we all know what it’s doing here.

He comes unexpectedly to her room that night to refresh her bandages and flirt. Their dynamic is extremely typical enemies to lovers bickering with a sexual undertone. You know the sort. He trains her and they bicker-flirt more. Then he takes her to a party in Nightshade. He gives her a dress and a mask.

“Does everyone wear this?” It was black and gave Wildling clothing competition for impropriety. It hung by two thin straps that looked one wrong move away from snapping, had the lowest cut bodice she had ever seen and a slit so high, there was very little fabric in the middle holding it all together.

Grim didn’t meet her eyes. “Most people do choose to wear little clothing, yes. At least, at celebrations like this. Some just wear paint.” He stared at her then, an eyebrow raised. “Would you prefer I get a pot of ink and a brush?”

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Ah, the classic ‘forced to dress extremely sexy by the love interest’. Wait, why is this a classic of YA again? It’s hard not to bring up something from ACOTAR again. I wish I didn’t have to. In that series, there is a very infamous scene where the lead character is made to dress in a tiny slip of a dress and decorated with body paint for an evening with the bad boy shadow love interest. In that one, the feminist pioneer and most beloved book husband Rhysand Night Court drugs the lead ‘for her own good’ so she won’t remember the sexual harassment she is subjected to by others and him. Real plot point. Real bad.

So Nightbane I guess at least is improving one detail of the content it is blatantly ripping off. Sure, Isla was made to help him at first by risk of death, and she didn’t pick this ill-fitting, exposing dress, and she will mostly wind up doing a sexy dance in it of her own volition, but at least he doesn’t drug her. The bar is astronomically low.

Isla is a virgin whose first kiss was Grim in their first meeting, so it’s not that surprising she may be shy about her body. She was also raised mostly in the palace. Still, there is something off about her having a cultural shock to nudity since many Wildlings are explicitly said to wear little to no clothing. It feels more like Isla’s shock at nudity here is to make her more flustered for Grim rather than paying any mind to her actual cultural heritage. Nudity isn’t innately sexual, as she probably would have been taught in the naturalist colony she rules.

Anyway, Grim and her are at this party looking for a guy who might have stolen the sword from the people who stole the sword. He has a giant snake with him at all times for inexplicable reasons. The thief is watching a sexy dance show in a tent, and Grim prompts Isla to join in and seduce the thief. Reading the next scene, let’s just all agree it’s nice she isn’t drugged. At least it’s not ACOTAR.

Grim looked from the dancers to Isla. Then back again.

She scoffed. “Absolutely not, you cursed demon-”

He shrugged a shoulder. “Then we’ll find another way. I just thought, you being a temptress and all, you could use your powers, since I’m unable to use mine.”

Powers. She was supposed to be a cursed hearteater, able to tempt a person with a single look. Capable of bringing anyone to their knees with her seduction. Somehow he hadn’t seemed to notice her powerlessness, beyond a few pointed statements. He couldn’t find out she didn’t have ability. Would he rescind his offer to help her during the Centennial?

Roaring began to fill her ears. They hadn’t found the skin gloves. She and Celeste needed him. Her people needed her. They were suffering.

“Can’t you just torture the information out of him?” she asked. Suddenly, that option sounded a lot more appealing.

Grim looked amused. “Of course I can, Hearteater. But one of the most infamous thieves, one of the only people who knows about the sword, turning up dead in a violent fashion? It would be suspicious…” He shrugged a shoulder. “I suppose, if you are unable to actually use your powers-”

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Quick facts: Grim knows she doesn’t have any powers. Grim nearly kills the thief anyway. Grim is the ruler and can do whatever he wants, so he doesn’t care about causing a suspicious death. Grim is potentially already working with Aurora/Celeste at this point. Grim is just negging her into doing a sexy dance for him.

Isla is able to be alone with the thief, drug him, and learn the next stage of the quest for the sword. Grim is furious when he walks in and sees Isla on the unconscious thief’s lap, because he’s that possessive of a girl he has only ever been a dick to. He pins her against the wall, says a lame line (“You’re not something I want to love… you’re something I want to ruin”), and shoves her through a portal.

Isla returns to the Night Market randomly to hunt for Grim. She’s immediately attacked and overpowered by a gang of Nightshade criminals. Grim then shows up to save her. He does the ‘who did this to you’ bit but before she can answer, he snaps all the assailants necks at the same time with his power and carries Isla away.

She got wounded, so he puts her on his lap to tend to her wounds while calling her an idiot. All typical stuff. She writhes in pain atop his lap and its implied he gets a boner. Cool.

They head finally to where the sword is, though there’s still much of this left. It turns out to be in a cave guarded by an actual dragon and a dozen magic traps. Who set all this up? We also get to hear about the sword itself, which has this weird design:

It was made of two pieces of metal, braided together like lovers, until they formed a single joined tip.

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Grim when speaking to the Blacksmith called the sword ‘twin blades’ as well despite it being one sword, I guess because it is literally two swords… twisted around each other like a caduceus? I’ve found little consensus on what this thing is supposed to look like, a lot of agreement it probably isn’t very good at being a sword.

Isla triggers a trap the moment they first step into the dragon cave, and Grim like a brave US Marine shelters her with his body and takes every arrow. This leads to, right after the last one, another scene where they tend to each other’s wounds as she looks after Grim. He continues to act weird about pain, leading to this:

“It isn’t an ideal. It’s truth. Emotion feeds power. And pain is the strongest.”

Isla frowned. That couldn’t be true.

“It is true,” he said, likely sensing her doubt.

If it was…. “Have you… have you ever purposefully…”

“Yes,” he said quickly. “I have purposefully caused myself pain to access deeper levels of power. That was a long time ago. Now it isn’t so necessary.” As if in afterthought, he said. “And… there are many different kinds of pain.”

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Ah, Grim’s cliché backstory continues to fill out. I have so little tolerance for the way self harm is written and treated in fantasy books like this. It isn’t Uglies levels of at all idealizing it, but I’m tired of it coming up at all. Why does Isla leap straight to asking Grim if he’s self harmed? This information will come up later, the pain is power thing, but Grim’s history of hurting himself won’t. It’s bringing up a serious topic and making it yet another bullet point in Grim’s tragic tableau so we can feel bad for him. Awww, he doesn’t even need to hurt himself anymore, because the pain in his heart is even stronger!

Ugh. I am simply tired of this trope, of authors taking things like drug abuse and self harm, putting a slight fantasy spin on it, and not thinking any more about the seriousness of the topics they are still technically writing about. It’s not that I think Nightbane needed to turn into a therapy session about severe mental illness and its effects, it’s more I think Nightbane shouldn’t be playing with the subject at all since it isn’t mature enough to handle it.

It’s not a little fun detail to sprinkle into your work just to make it Dark, you know?

Anyway, Isla and Grim continue to tackle the dragon cave by throwing Grim in front of all the bullets they can. I support this. Our next check up has them sharing a bath together. Rather than continue their increasing horniness, they have a weirdly tense medicinal bath where they face different directions, slowly turn around, and then quietly stared at each other. In a better book there might be something to that quiet acknowledgment of bathing on either end of a giant bathtub as comrades, in this book it’s kind of funny how awkward it is and how suddenly the chapter ends.

Next, we have a ball interruption. At least it isn’t yet another wound tending scene, and it gives us more of the hilarious edgy Nightshade society.

If the word debauchery had been a place, Isla was looking at it.

The halls of the castle were filled with music so loud and fast it drowned out the moans she could hear only when she passed by the dark halls, people moving furiously in the shadows. Inside the ballroom, all pretense of propriety was abandoned.

People danced with long ribbons of black silk, on platforms lining the room between suits of armor. In the darker corners of the rooms, couples were coupling, not seeming to care in the slightest that they had hundreds of people as their witnesses.

Before, Isla had felt embarrassed by the amount of skin she was showing, but now she saw she was wearing almost the most fabric in the room. Her dress was black gossamer, with a dipping neckline, two pieces covering her breasts, then coming together in the middle. It had a slit up to her hip.

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With long quotes like this I generally respond to the overall and do my best to avoid pointing out obvious bad writing. I and plenty of people caught the earlier instance of ‘Grim shrugged his shoulder’ being used twice in the same few paragraphs; Nightbane like Lightlark is full of basic bad prose like that. Here I’m just going to shoot from the hip on a lot of stuff.

Couples coupling, you say? And she was almost the most dressed? The height of debauchery is the sound of moaning, semi public sex, and like, house music? How exciting.

I do really get a kick out of how… vanilla this vision of sexy sin is. This is a YA book and I am surprised but don’t mind the lack of explicit details. Still, for something meant to be shocking and perverse it appears the Nightshade’s Night Court doesn’t dream higher than a nightclub with a lack of security. Isla finds Grim on his throne and sexily taunts him. Every time I add a quote it is that much extra work for my editor and myself, but also I need this one.

Even from far away, she could see that he was furious. Women fought for his attention, barely clothed, but he was watching her, eyes blazing with so much anger, he looked ready to wage a war.

Isla did the most foolish thing in response to his anger, which was smile and blow him a mocking kiss.

Immediately, he stood, knocking over some of the goblets that the women had placed around his throne. He didn’t even look down; all he did was take a step forward […].

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I find Grim’s pissy little throne sit covered in wenches which he discards with half a dozen goblets of wine to be extremely funny. Look at that idiot on his sad empty chair of horniness and with more thots than he can handle. Poor baby.

Grim doesn’t talk to or do anything with Isla though, just watches her in anger. She dances and flirts with another man and leaves with him. She’s still only ever done anything sexual with Grim, and is curious to have more experience. She doesn’t feel the same spark with this other man, but also isn’t unhappy with the experience of kissing him, more feeling it out.

Then, mid make out, the man is stabbed through the chest by Grim and tossed on the floor.

“Don’t worry, Hearteater. He’s not dead. I will make sure of it,” Grim said in response to her expression of horror. He leaned down to whisper, very slowly, “Because I’m going to bring him to the brink of death a thousand times before I will finally allow him the mercy of dying.”

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Yikes! Isla and Grim are not together by any means. He has just stabbed and threatened to torture a man just because Isla allowed him to touch her. This is extremely controlling, frightening behavior which-

…Oh, wait, actually the guy was evil and Grim was just saving her life again? So it’s fine and not creepy for him to torture and murder a guy for touching her? Oh. Of course.

Grim announces the man Isla was kissing had actually secretly fantasy roofied her, and he’d just recognized the signs as she was leaving with him. She only starts to feel the fantasy roofie after Grim has saved her, so from her point of view it’s still a bit of a shock. Random guy, trying to be independent and kiss someone who isn’t Grim… oops! He’s goddamn dead and Grim is telling me it is for her own good.

But you know, she does feel weird, and he gives her an antidote, so clearly the man was a criminal and everything Grim did was above board and cool.

Just so you know, it really doesn’t matter if Grim actually is morally bad. I like villain romance, but I like the kind where they are villains. I understand the appeal of a ‘dark romance’, of a scary monster romance. Love interests don’t have to pass a morality test to be quality characters. But Grim isn’t someone who does controlling stuff and owns up to it, he’s not someone who is simply evil but also has the hots for Isla… Grim instead controls Isla’s life and actions and he and the narrative tell us it’s just a good thing he was there. For a sad edgy shadow man, he isn’t particularly morally evil. He just sucks.

After saving Isla from rape yet again, he then immediately hits on her while she’s still rattled.

His eyes seared through her as he looked her slowly up and down. “We do such depraved things, in my dreams.”

Isla opened her mouth. Closed it.

Grim leaned closer, so they shared breath. “When you finally do beg me to touch you- and you will- you won’t want anyone else to touch you ever again, Hearteater.” His voice was a dark whisper against her ear. “Late at night, you will think of me touching you. With my hands. My mouth.” Isla’s chest went tight at his words, his proximity. Her insides puddled; she was hot everywhere. “And you will dream of me too.”

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There’s I believe a deliberate effort on the book’s part to make Isla an active participant in the romance, which is a good thing. She multiple times is the one to seek Grim out, after all, and sometimes asks a suggestive question. She is into him. Still, it’s impossible to ignore the fact too that she is 19 years old and he is over 500. He’s not even like a fey, a different species on another timescale- he is a human like her who has lived as she had for an extremely long time. And she is a girl who has been abused and manipulated and kept in a cage her entire life.

He even knows that. Not when they first met but likely by now timeline wise. Part of the reveals in Lightlark was that he was working with Aurora/Celeste himself and entirely aware how Isla had been abused and raised for the single purpose of seducing Oro for Aurora’s plan. He knows who Isla is. He was friends with and the boss of her dad- her dad being the man who made Grim his curse-immune necklace. He knows Isla has no experience and likely can guess by her actions she’s a virgin.

I like age gaps, actually, but not the creepy kind. Isla at 20 is older than most YA leads, but it’s worth noting one of the main factors to consider with age gaps in relationships is the power dynamic. She is 20, she can date that hot 500 year old, but isn’t it kind of weird a hot 500 year old would be interested in a girl who has no life experience and has only ever lived in her childhood bedroom as a prisoner?

Grim and hers next meeting is him yet again being gravely injured so she can tend his wounds. Here he explains the sword: his ancestor, Cronan… okay, one second. Cronan. His ancestor’s name is Cronan. Come on!

So, Cronan the barbarian had the sword commissioned to turn his soldiers into dreks a few thousand years ago. The sword also allows people to command the dreks. Grim is looking for it because dreks have been attacking Nightshade for a few centuries now, but the sword has been cursed so that if a Nightshade used their powers near it, the sword would teleport away. Isla’s role here is to retrieve the sword as he can’t.

Their conversation moves on to Grim and the women he sleeps with. He assures her he hasn’t had sex with anyone else since meeting her, and that Nightshade ruler tradition has it he isn’t allowed to have sex with the same person twice. It sounds silly but is one of the few lore snippets that makes enough sense, since in this world him falling in love could lead directly to the end of his entire country thanks to love bond power stealing. Isla calls him lonely, and we get a favorite line.

He shrugged a shoulder. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Love is for fools, anyway. It makes people do foolish things.” He looked at her and said, “I do not intent to become a fool.”

`313

Eloquently said, dumbass.

The next time they visit- because there are 22 of these chapters, remember- Grim takes Isla to a giant field of flowers. With some investigation, she realizes these flowers are the same as the ‘rare flower’ which is used to make Wildling healing solution. As has been said repeatedly by now, Isla thought there was only one small patch of the important flowers, despite the fact the Wildlings seem capable of harvesting a near infinite number of elixirs from it. Again, we know Wildling powers can be used to propagate and age plants instantly, certainly Isla can, so the fact there’s a magic flower they are perpetually running out of doesn’t make much sense.

She also realizes she doesn’t know the name of the flower despite it being the most key invention the Wildlings have and deeply important to the plot of both books. It turns out the rare flower is nightbane! In the Nightshade lands, nightbane is turned into a euphoric drug. In Wildling, it’s turned into a healing potion. They’re actually opposites, as the Wildling elixir cures wounds but doesn’t numb pain while the Nightshade elixir numbs pain but doesn’t heal wounds.

The meaning of the title Nightbane is now clear, and the book does not let you forget it.

Both poison and remedy. Opposites, like her and Grim. The ruler of life and the ruler of shadows.

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Isla and Grim work out a sudden deal where Isla offers to have Wildlings make healing potions for Nightshade if Grim provides the flowers needed, and also hearts for her people. Heart logistics have not come up this book particularly and I like to imagine this mention was put in here just for me. Really though, I’m not going to get into it especially when we still don’t know how often they had to eat hearts, but Grim sending a few extras really isn’t going to tip the extinction scales mathematically.

Grim and Isla once more nearly have sex, and then he has to flee. Then immediately next chapter he returns, and then again have the same repetitive lead up to sex: Isla once more in a thin night gown, Grim looking like a demon with wide shoulders and an alluded to hard on. This time he fingers her, which true sex maniacs out there will realize is the third time Isla has been fingered and also the third time there’s been confirmed sex in this series. It’s true it’s better than just skipping to penetration, but the sex scenes so far feel exactly the same and the fact they’re all the same act doesn’t help that.

Grim does have penetrative sex afterwards- god, the sentences I casually write- but it’s far quicker. While this book is far hornier than Lightlark, it is remarkably scant on details, treading this odd line of never naming specific acts while making it unmistakable what is going on.

While at this point we’ve culminated their relationship with sex and they have nearly obtained the sword, Isla and Grim’s fantastic flashback derby isn’t done yet. Instead, another interlude. Isla asks Grim to take her to a festival in Skyling and he does. It’s just romantic fluff serving no other purpose than to give me dark hot air balloon based memories.

There’s an unimportant scene in this book where Isla has to wrestle a giant snake as it attempts to strangle, eat, and drown her at the same time. True champions may know how similar that is to something which happens in Save The Pearls, another book series I covered. If I had two nickels for every YA book I’ve covered with giant snake strangle-drowning, I’d have two nickels, et cetera. Except also here we have hot air balloons. Yet again, The Command Ment haunts me. If I had a nickel for every bad YA book I’ve covered with hot air balloon festival based romance scenes, I’d…

Man, I don’t want these nickels.

The hot air balloon festival in Skyling is named Launch of Orbs. Not the orbs, just… orbs. It’s to celebrate the new season of hot-air balloons being unveiled. You know how hot air balloon technology is, always improving every season… (this is another Command Ment joke).

Grim takes the chance to do the cliché ‘it’s beautiful isn’t it’ call to the response of him looking at her and going ‘no, true beauty is something else’. He calls her the bane of his existence, also, which ha- bane. Nightbane. Get it?

He then steals a hot air balloon and starts going hard and heavy with her in the basket. He then shoves her off the edge, pulling one of the most difficult maneuvers in the world of heavy petting: the ‘falling from a hot air balloon to riding dick pipeline’.

Grim pressed her fully against his chest- and pushed her over the edge.

Before she could scream, the world tilted, and she landed on Grim. He was on her bed. She was straddling him.

A thousand violent words in her throat, but all of them withered and died when she felt him- every inch of him- against her.

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This is a pretty advanced move to pull in the bedroom. I wouldn’t recommend it.

They again raid the dragon’s cave, but before they can claim the sword, Grim saves Isla’s life with his powers and the sword teleports away. He says he only wants her now and they have a far longer sex scene full of dramatic declarations. Grim makes another subtle comment about Isla.

“Hearteater. You are both curse… […] and cure.”

353

You know, cause, you know- because she’s- it’s like she’s the bane of his existence. Like nightbane. You get it? She’s like nightbane, which is also the title of this book. You see?

They have sex all night long and then Grim says something really romantic about Isla. Check this out.

“Hearteater,” he said. “You are a bane.” She remembered his words from before: You are both curse and cure.

354

Do you get it? That she’s- Isla is- she’s like the bane of the night, she’s like nightbane, she’s a poison but also… the cure. LIKE NIGHTBANE.

Grim also goes on to note it’s ‘never been like that’ for him before, that having sex with this 20 year old virgin has been the most incredible sex of his life. Considering how Isla felt about kissing someone who wasn’t Grim, I honestly think we may see a soulmate revelation by book 3.

Oh, and Isla finds and delivers Grim a baby dragon. It’s never mentioned again.

We jump ahead again, still in this endless journey. Isla randomly is in the woods one day and feels a vibe, and follows it until she finds the shadow sword just laying in the open. Isla gives it to Grim, and he again gives some lore information, explaining that Lightlark is a world in miniature which their ancestors fled from for unexplained reasons. The portal to return is located within Lightlark island, and Nightshade has always wanted to claim Lightlark in order to access this portal and return. We do not know again why they would want to, what this place they came from was like- Grim knows the layout of the countries in the old world but clarifies nothing else.

Apparently, opening the portal within Lightlark would destroy the island and the entire pocket dimension. This is key to the present plotline, which I’ve put aside for this aside, and is Grim’s goal for the plot of Nightbane. He is trying to claim Lightlark to use the portal beneath it, and Cleo is helping him because she for some reason thinks her dead son can come back to life in the old world.

Isla asks if Grim will use the drek commanding sword, and he clarifies he no longer wants to. His original plan the moment he realized she was immune to curses- being the daughter of his old curse-immune buddy- he planned to make her break the curse on the sword and likely die in the process. He’s changed his mind now. Aw. Isla is rightfully upset he planned to use her like that and orders him gone.

He returns later anyway, saying more dreks had appeared and he was maybe going to now die fighting them. Check out this amazing thing he says about her:

“I need you to know that you changed everything.” He ran his thumb down her cheek. “The gods don’t listen to people like me, but I would go on my knees and beg them to let me keep you. You were once the bane of my existence… and now, you are the center of it.”

386

God fuck it. Did you see that? She is the BANE of his existence, the BANE, like-

Okay, whatever. At this point the most interesting part of that paragraph is more confirmation religion exists. Oh, and he continues, and it’s exactly as you’d imagine:

“My entire world was night, and you lit a match. No matter what happens to me in this life, I’ll find you in the next one. I’ll always find you. What I feel for you can never be extinguished. Like the nighttime sky, it is infinite. You and me… we’re infinite.”

386

See again my theory we’re getting to some sort of soulmate situation with these lines. Grim confiscates her starstick, but powerless Isla is able to borrow his teleportation power through his love bond and goes to be with him. She takes the drek sword, and on seeing a village beset by dreks and Grim nearly die, is able to channel her pain into a wave of endless destruction that destroys everything in the vicinity that isn’t Grim. Isla begins to die, and Grim teleports her away.

We’ll end the Grim sidequest there. There’s one final bit of information, a last ridiculous twist or two, but we’ll hop back to the present before revealing it. This is the end of the flashback montage. I hope you enjoyed your ride.

Reflection

The flashbacks are, as I said leading in, what the fans of this series want and wanted. I assume they are losing their mind over them, actually. Grim says a lot of big dramatic romantic things, he performs the tropes we all know and love with the efficiency of a circus seal and he’s the champion of the world at having sex good. These chapters are woven in between the story of Nightbane, but the present always feels second to the past. Flashback chapters are generally longer. They flow in a linear fashion and stick to one primary story line. They are better than the main book and where all the attention really lies.

I’m really not opposed to the tropes Grim represents. Like anything, execution is far more important than concept. I love a shadow boy, honest, I’ve just not met one in YA I like.

Something that is much harder to explain to you is how the flashbacks sit within the book itself and how Isla feels about them. I’ve explained at this point that Isla very rarely reacts to information she learns, usually asking a question or two and not lingering much longer. While she wakes up from these dream flashbacks and remarks internally about what she’s witnessed, it’s all quite fleeting. Most of it is Isla determining she doesn’t recognize the girl in these memories- that she is radically different from the person she was with Grim.

Isla, however, is not. Her personality is even less defined than in Lightlark, but Isla in these flashbacks is entirely in character for herself. She rather has to be. After all, all of this stuff happened to her last year before being forcibly forgotten. If Isla had significant character growth from hanging with Grim, she would have experienced it either ways- just not recalled what prompted the change. It would be interesting if Isla in these memories was different, was at all a personality defined, but she’s the same impulsive, impetuous girl we’re familiar with.

The flashbacks illustrate and add nothing to our understanding of Isla now, only just the specific details of how her relationship with Grim went. That’s fine, that’s what they are there for, but it’s annoying to see the book remark on her change when she’s so obviously the same.

Part 3

Coming together

Now, we head back.

Grim has declared he’s coming to Lightlark in a month and people can either join him, flee, or die. Oro, Isla, and the nobody gang are involved in a bunch of side quests to ready for him: tracking special ore, recruiting Ancient Creatures, making an energy barrier from Starling power. There’s vaguely a Khaki Rebellion, and Oro and Isla have had sex once and ended their romantic development.

The Skylings, a democracy, hold a vote on if they want to help defend Lightlark and decide against it. Azul is apologetic but listens to his people. I had a bingo card of predictions for this book, and one randomly generated one I had made for me included both ‘Azul’ and ‘No Azul’ on the same line. I counted both as being true. Top tier guy. Love him. Go fly off being sad, gay, and fabulous far away from here my good man.

Isla feels torn between Oro and her hot memories of Grim. She doesn’t talk to Oro or anyone else about her conflict though, so it never amounts to interesting character development. One thing in particular bothering her is the invisible magic necklace she can’t remove.

I haven’t brought it up yet. It’s the potato necklace, infamous for being introduced in Lightlark by being described as having a black diamond ‘the size of a small potato’. Grim gave it to her last book and took her to hold it and think at him and he’d come instantly to her side. It conveniently can turn invisible, too. This book, it’s revealed she can’t remove it no matter how hard she tries.

We’ll circle back on the necklace later, but I wanted to establish it now. I have a lot of things to say about this necklace when its significance is finally revealed.

Isla around this point has the memory where Grim tells her pain is power, and begins to hurt herself to boost her power, growing thorn thickets across Lightlark to act as defense against the coming siege. There is minimal strategic planning in the lead up to this attack, by the way, beyond Isla dropping a bunch of thorn and quicksand pits around the place to deter intruders.

Isla keeps repeating Power Tastes Like Blood as she bleeds from every orifice on her face and cuts herself to grow in power. It’s all quite sudden and not a reoccurring thing at all, as Oro comes across her and makes her promise not to overdo it like this again. As developments go, she feels like she needs to be more powerful to save Lightlark, hence turning to this ‘dark’ source of magic… but mostly it feels like a way to make Isla feel more dark and have a dramatic scene. I’ve already covered how I feel about the use of self harm fueling power and being used carelessly in a narrative.

There’s a random interlude which will presumably come up next book, so I must mention it now. Isla visits Celeste/Aurora’s old room. She’s emotional about the betrayal of her friend and expresses her feelings by smashing the place up, specifically starting with orbs Aurora told her contained ‘mysterious things’. Now, Aurora was a liar, but I probably would take her word there’s things in those orbs if I were you- but Isla just breaks them all. One of them has a feather in it, which she takes with her.

The emotions Isla feels here are actually important and interesting, I want them to be addressed, but the scene is randomly in the middle of the book and the magic mystery orbs contribute nothing yet.

The Khaki Rebellion makes their triumphant return and explains the Nexus curse, which I can only assume I explained about a real time hour or two ago at this point. I’ll talk more about the specifics of that curse when I cover the worldbuilding and plotholes. Maren, the secret leader, asks Isla to kill Oro to help break the Nexus curse which binds citizens to their rulers, but she refuses out of love. Maren believes Isla is immune to curses and so if she became the ruler of Lightlark instead of Oro, her curse immunity would also end the Nexus curse for her subjects.

Isla heads to the Wildling newlands to check in on her people, and finds they have all disappeared. Grim has left her a note saying he’s brought them to Nightshade, and that everyone is waiting for her.

In anger, Isla uses her magic necklace to summon Grim and they reunite in the present. Earlier it’s said Isla sent word for her guardians Poppy and Terra to be banished from Wildling, and it’s come up by now no one seemed to enforce the order. It turns out Grim took them in and has been working with them.

She shook her head, unbelieving. Hoping she was wrong. “You have Poppy and Terra,” she said, her voice a whisper. “You took them in.”

Grim nodded, and her tears fell freely now. The betrayal…

“You know what they did to me. What they did to my parents-”

“It is unforgivable,” he said. “But you need them. You need-”

“I don’t need anyone!”

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She’s rightfully pissed he’s working with the people who killed her parents and raised her singularly to be a sacrifice for Aurora’s plan, but Grim shuts her up with a flirtation and then reminds her he knows better. He says he’s no monster, not for saving her people, bringing them to a land with more resources, where they wanted to go. He even wiped their memories of heart-consuming guilt because they wanted him to!

Isla calls out that he’d mind-wipe again after what happened with her, but Grim rather smugly says it was her people’s own choice and they have a right to choose, don’t they? Sure, she didn’t want to be mind wiped, but these people did, so shut up Isla! She calls him out for sending the dreks to attack her coronation and he corrects her that it was just a random act of drek violence and had nothing to do with him. She points out the whole ‘I’m coming to destroy everyone on Lightlark’ threat he made, and he again corrects her.

“You are coming to kill everyone on the island. You will murder thousands of innocents just to get it. You sent a message of ruin, of destruction-”

“No, I’m not. I warned everyone here, which is more than they deserve. They can either leave… or join us. It is their choice. No one has to die.”

[…]

“Do you really think anyone would give up their home without fighting?”

“When fighting is futile… I do.”

Isla was filled with rage. Hurt.

“Heart,” he said gently. “If I wanted to take the island by force, I could. Right now. Destroy all of it and everyone, in a matter of seconds. The curses are over.”

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He taunts her about the immovable necklace and tells her everything he’s doing is for her and then leaves.

Boy Grim, boy! This entire conversation is a mess. I’m not opposed to Grim acting as a villain, obsessed with his own goals instead of morality, but what stirs my pasta about him is that the book constantly reminds us he’s right. He’s not a villain, he’s the hero- he is doing what is best and he is correct and Isla just hasn’t forgiven him yet. Isla’s people wanted to be kidnapped. Grim isn’t going to war, he’s giving a merciful warning because he’s unflappably powerful.

Isla’s anger is repeatedly met by the revelation she is merely ignorant. She’s not validated for her feelings, she only has to learn to love Grim more. He’s not a villain who makes mistakes, he’s a hero whose version of reality is secretly the only true one, who is making correct choices and knowing if it hurts Isla- like teaming up with her abusers- it’s only because he knows best.

Insufferable.

After meeting with Grim, Isla tells the council that she did so and comes up with a plan to steal Grim’s powers through their love bond. She didn’t believe at the start of the book Grim loved her anymore, but meeting him in person she was able to sense their connection, and has realized she could solve the invasion in one easy step exploiting that.

Considering ‘steal the powers of a ruler via love bond’ was the goal she was raised with her entire life, it’s silly it took her this long. The exact methods of stealing powers like this are never clarified, she learns how off page from an Ancient Creature, and figures she can block Grim’s powers when he invades and leave him vulnerable to attack.

At this point, most of the way through, Isla opens the vault. This is the mcguffin door from the start of book, the cliffhanger at the end. Last time she tried to open it she had a vision of Grim surrounded by dead bodies and shadows and learned she needed to master her powers to open the door properly. Page 361 and it opens, and inside is… empty. Woo.

Before we can even dwell on that, Isla’s mentor Poppy shows up suddenly to sword fight her. Isla uses the purest manifestation of power there is and makes a shitty gem sword:

She created another sword, this one crafted out of a thousand gems. She made them from thin air, her power hardening into crystal and ruby and diamond. It took so much effort, enough that she felt her power scraped to the very bottom, getting every last shred. It was her anger, hardened into a blade, glimmering, remembering, about to make her guardian pay.

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Isla loses and Poppy taunts her with the revelation the portal to the old world is actually in this vault before walking away. Isla in a panic explains this to the council, and how opening the portal will destroy Lightlark. They now know what Grim is coming for and part of why. It doesn’t actually change the war effort particularly, and Isla scampers off again to get a prophecy from the unfrozen oracle.

Hey, wasn’t it the lore last book that the oracles were frozen into ice by Sunling kings and despised pretty much everyone? She appears to just be chilling in this book, freezing and unfreezing herself at will to deliver useless prophecies. The oracle tells her Isla’s fate is divided perfectly in two, and she is destined to kill either Grim or Oro. Oh damn. How will she chose.

The oracle also makes the following very clever, very interesting and subtle, fascinating comment:

“You, whose heart has been split in two more ways than one, are capable of both life and death. You are both curse and cure.”

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Goddamn, do you think she’s at all like, a bane and a blessing, or am I just spit-balling. Maybe like. A poison. But also the antidote? I dunno lads.

It’s the morning of the war- a phrase the book uses that makes it sound like a softball game- and Oro is acting like he’s just read his obituary. Tell me if you think this is the behavior of a man who is going to live:

“Isla,” Oro said softly. She looked up at him. He traced her lips with the tip of his finger and smiled. Then his face became serious. “If something happens to me, I want you to leave. I want you to take all my powers and leave.”

She frowned. “Oro, nothing is going to-”

“Love,” he said, smiling again. He looked almost happy… almost at peace. He tucked a stray hair and said, “It’s all for you.” He took her hand and he kept smiling. “All these years, I saved it for you.”

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Oro’s sudden moribund acceptance continues, leading to one of my favorite scenes to summarize for friends. I kept calling it the ‘of mice and men style oral sex on the beach scene’, which is only slightly an exaggeration. A better description is to imagine this as two soldiers comforting each other in the trenches of world war one as one is slowly bleeding out.

His kiss was desperate, like it might be one of the last things he would ever do. He leaned down and whispered in her ear, “One day, I’m going to take you to my favorite place.” She remembered him telling her about it. A beach on Sun Isle with water the green of her eyes. “And I’m going to make it your favorite place too.”

Isla smiled. She wanted that, desperately. She could see it so clearly- Oro pressing her against the sand, waves washing around them while he wrung pleasure from her, the same way he had in their bedroom.

And she could see beyond that too.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “We’re going to do that not one day but tomorrow. We’re going to win, everything is going to be fine, Lightlark is going to survive, and we’re going to go to the beach tomorrow.”

Oro smiled. Nodded. But she knew him now. She could see the tiny signs.

He didn’t believe her.

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It’d be pretty incredible if Isla did end this book by going to oral sex beach and shooting Oro with a gun.

I’ll do the obvious and point out they’ve had weeks of free time and a month of war planning, so it’s really on Oro’s fault for not taking her to a very nearby beach sooner.

We then launch finally into the climax. It’s a big fantasy battle, and it’s very poorly written. I’ve read a lot of paranormal romance YA trilogies, you see, so I’m intimately familiar with obligatory giant fantasy battles and this is no different. The fight is not engaging, with stakes and imagery too scant to picture. A bunch of characters throw magic at each other. Nameless baddies and goodies die. The book tries to check in with everyone and their legally mandated paragraph of action, but neither the reader nor the author actually cares about half of it. Oh, Calder will regret every violent death he causes because of his peaceful nature? Wish I’d known that ahead of time. Ah, one of the twin bodyguards died? How tragic. The infamous ‘special ore’ which can harm dreks, which featured a whole chapter sidequest to a place literally just named the Forgotten Mines? Ah, there it is, use once. Great, glad we saw all that.

Oro and Grim fight as Isla just stands aside and watches. Another classic of any trashy YA series from the 2010s. This fight is delightfully cartoonish.

Oro let his sword disappear and shot up into the air.

Grim followed. He portaled so quickly that it was as if he were also flying, appearing then disappearing in wild spurts. They dueled in the sky, this time with streams of power.

Isla watched from below, finding herself cringing at every blow the other landed. She bit the inside of her mouth, dread churning in her chest.

There was no winning.

A rumble sounded before the sea spiraled up, becoming a massive snake that lunged at Grim. In response, he spun a wolf formed of shadows. The creatures battled, mauling each other, protecting their creators.

Oro shot out his hand, releasing a dozen throwing blades made from flames. Grim blocked them with a dark curl of smoke before that shield became a dozen arrows all aimed at Oro’s chest.

388-389

They anime clash until Grim pulls the old switcheroo and gets Oro to strike himself with lightning. Isla grabs Grim’s powers for a moment, and Oro goes to kill him at last, but Grim suddenly freaks out and tells Oro to stop. If Grim dies, Isla dies!

I do somewhat miss plot twist corner. This book has too few for me to really have one, but here we go. The meeting point of the flashbacks and the present: Isla died after saving Grim in the past with shadow powers, and Grim saved her life by linking her life to his.

This is not an ability we have ever been told is possible, and book as typical doesn’t care. Oro is aware of life binding. Grim is. Isla is, even, now that she suddenly remembers it- but we never actually have a scene of Grim explaining what this means, only Isla remembering that he did. It’s second hand information from a first hand source.

“You bound her to you,” Oro said, voice shaking with anger. With shock.

She remembered now, Grim’s explanation in the past. She knew binding someone to oneself meant sharing a life. Not just powers, but life itself.

One could not die without killing the other.

That was why, when the arrow had split her heart in two during the Cenntennial, she hadn’t died immediately. Not just because of the power of the heart of Lightlark… but because Grim had been keeping her alive.

“It was only a temporary solution,” Oro said, voice shaking with anger, but also fear.

Grim nodded. “The other world offers a permanent solution.”

That was the reason for the war. That was the reason for all this death. She remembered what Cleo had said. In the other world, souls can rise once more.

He wanted to open the portal to save her life.

398

You know, of all the plotholes in Lightlark, I was actually willing to accept the magic egg-heart of Lightlark was why Isla had lived after taking an arrow to the heart. Like, I didn’t really need that to be resolved to also be because of Grim. Aren’t there enough things Grim’s doing at this point?

With this reveal… well. I don’t have an issue really with Grim binding her life to his to save it in the past, since they were in love. She likely would have consented to it if she hadn’t been dying. A lot of other stuff around this is questionable though, of course.

Grim and Cleo both inexplicably know about the old world while the ruler of Lightlark himself doesn’t, but they also seem to only know like two things about it: it’s sealed on Lightlark with a portal of no return that will end the world, and um, the dead shall rise again. Is that… really actually enough information to pursue an invasion? Grim wants to bring Isla to the other world so her death can be undone even better and, I guess, so she can be unbound from his life. He is doing this without her asking him to, or without any need to. As long as Grim lives, she lives. If Grim was to retire to an island and not invade Lightlark, Isla would be far safer than she is now. Just don’t get assassinated and chill out, Grim. She was fine until you started a war based on a rumor.

Isla begs Oro to kill Grim anyway but he refuses. Isla pleads about her vision of the future, of Grim surrounded by shadows and innocent deaths, only to realize that vision was actually just another memory of the past. Just as her vision of her death was, Isla is remembering the same incident of accessing her Nightshade powers and saving Grim from dreks.

Except the shadows in those memories were all hers, and so all the innocent deaths… oh no! Those were her as well. She overdid it back then and lost control of her power, killing a whole village including children.

Isla breaks down at this memory clicking into place and recalls the trauma of the incident. Oro tries to comfort her but she rejects him, suddenly afraid of herself as a monster that might overdo it again and hurt him. Oro tries to assure her a mistake is not the same as being a monster, but Isla is freaking out.

Grim then bellows something. We are basically at the end of the book, and this is the final big twist. Are you ready?

She tried to wrestle herself away, but Oro didn’t budge. He didn’t understand; he didn’t know how much of a danger she was to him-

Grim’s voice seemed to rumble the world as he said, “Let go of my wife.”

There it was. The final missing piece.

400

Isla and Grim have been goddamn married this entire time. Both books. Full time. Married. Before, I guess, the christian god, in a church, at an altar. Married. God.

What was that joke going around, about self proclaimed ‘wife guys’, again? Grim is a wife guy. He is a ‘I will immediately marry you after tying your soul to mine and experiencing deep trauma, because this is what a healthy relationship is’ kinda wife guy.

We get very little information on their marriage or even what marriage is. It’s certainly unclear why Grim would never bring any of this up. Sure, the reveal last book that Isla had ever been in a relationship with Grim upset her too much for them to exchange more information, but at this point I think Grim could have played the ‘we literally are legally married’ card by now.

The penultimate chapter of the book turns suddenly to an unexpected direction. The potato necklace.

She watched Grim take a necklace out of his pocket and present it to her. One with the biggest black diamond she had ever seen. “In Nightshade, instead of rings, we give necklaces,” he said. “I should have given this to you before. It’s a sign of our commitment. Once I put it on, it is on forever. Only with your death will it be released.”

401

Isla in the past asks Grim to put it on, but he relents, and then apologies as he wipes her memories, bringing us full circle to the start of book one. This is a key scene on two fronts then: the original context of the mind wipe- which is to say, there was no discussion, only Grim’s choice- and the necklace being a marriage necklace.

A… cursed marriage necklace. Except it’s not cursed, because Isla is immune to curses. It’s just a necklace with a core function of being impossible to take off. Remember magic items in this universe require part of the creator’s magic, very soul, to create. Someone is giving years off their life to make shitty immovable necklaces. You better not get a divorce or remarry in Nightshade or your neck is going to be weighed down by diamonds.

The necklace deeply annoys me. For one, Isla is wearing it in the present… because Grim gave it to her. He did not tell her it was a necklace which could never be removed, nor its severe connotations as a marriage object. He lied to her about the function and put it on her. It doesn’t matter if she consented in the past- he killed that consent by wiping her memory of it and their entire romantic relationship. And now she’s stuck with it!

Grim doesn’t appear to have a matching necklace either. I can imagine book 3 he might, or a ring, but he doesn’t bring it up as a ‘matching set’ sort of scenario. So apparently the marriage custom in Nightshade is for men to collar women permanently to mark them? Cool, cool, great. You know, hard to remove necklaces to signify a special relationship is already a thing IRL, but in BDSM it’s actually consensual.

This is not. And again, can never be removed no matter what.

The book is about over here. There’s a short final chapter where Isla decides she’s a monster and asks if Grim will stop attacking Lightlark if she goes with him. He says yes, and so she does, telling Oro she loves him but also loved Grim. The book ends.

This review does not.

Plot, wrapped

Well.

We’re about 18,000 words in, and that about covers Nightbane. I’m going to move towards broader stuff, expand on some topics I brought up and the worldbuilding in general, especially how the lore evolved and was edited between the two books. I perpetually feel like I am forgetting something: Lightlark is like that, and the fact there will be a third book, that I will next year be seized upon by the same wretched ghast that has forced me to read Nightbane, terrifies me. But I must be strong.

Nightbane is as cobbled together as Lightlark was, but suffers under the sophomore book curse that comes for most YA series. It wants to add more but isn’t prepared for it. It is obsessed suitably with the past for a novel where all the best bits happen via flashback. New characters and new lore are fleeting to the monolith of Grim, perhaps to be addressed next book.

Reading Nightbane feels a lot like reading a book being hastily written before your eyes. It has the cadence of a NaNoWriMo project aided by a bullet point of popular plot holes to address. Certain things are freely clarified and adjusted. I don’t believe for a moment there is a ‘lore bible’ for this world, and I’m not sure if Aster even looked through her own book before writing the sequel. Nightbane is, ultimately, a scramble.

Is it better than Lightlark?

The problem with boiling it all down to this one question is that the answer is yes, but yes doesn’t really cut it.

There is more effort in the prose. The first chapter opens with the nicest prose of the book, and there’s other nice lines scattered. There’s also the same vague scrappy writing that brought us ‘shiny, cliffy, thing’. There is some effort at theme, of multiple parallels drawn, but they mostly boil down to calling Isla both life and death in a thousand different ways. There’s a significant increase in characters with darker skin and a lesbian, there’s some talk of mental illness and abusive love. But mostly there’s just Grim and Isla, same as before.

The things that make it so I can say ‘Nightbane is an improvement’ all feel more like punchups than an author genuinely trying hard in the face of overwhelming criticism. I’ll admit it’s an impossible job to follow up a book as reviled as Lightlark, and Aster had a very uphill battle. The prose is at least notably better. But that doesn’t mean the book is.

I think a lot of people honestly forget, weird as it sounds, that writing a book is not one skill but a series of skills. It isn’t just raw text- the prose- that counts. Dialogue is a skill, plotting is a skill, worldbuilding is a skill, and so on. Most authors have strengths and weaknesses and a book can be defeated or saved by any factor being particularly good or bad.

Nightbane still is not a good book, and it is hard for me to see it as better. It’s the same in another way, a slight change but not enough for me to believe it’s genuine progress. I think for that I’d have to see any self awareness of her weaknesses.

Lore

This one goes to the real Lightheads out there, because I want to talk about the broader lore around curses and power in this world and it’s going to be nearly incomprehensible. And require me to bust out ol’ Lightlark 1 again.

It’s very difficult to piece together the lore of this world despite the relative lack of it. Most lore is delivered in paragraph long explanations and nothing else, and a lot of it fails to add together. I want to both untangle it and understand it as if that wasn’t a futile effort. The best place to start with this is the Nexus curse.

Nexus Curse

Nexus was introduced in Nightbane but serves as one of the key sets of rules that defines the entire world. Let’s head straight to the source, Maren and the Khaki Rebellion.

“We have all historically been tied to the rulers’ lives, because of the power they alone channel. Do you know why, Isla?”

She shook her head.

“Because thousands of years ago, the king’s ancestors had a Nightshade create a series of curses called nexus, designed to keep the people weak. Everyone- except for his line- was cursed to only be born with a single ability. And people were cursed to be tied to their rulers, so power could never be overthrown. Nexus was meant to keep us all weak. Subserviant. Loyal.”

Nexus? She had never heard of it. “How do you know any of this?”

“History was buried. It took centuries for our group to finally gather this information. It started during the curses. You six were the stars of the Centennial, but we regular islanders also worked to break them. We learned that it used to be possible for a person to denounce their power and leave a realm. […] We believed if we could figure out how they did it, we could give up our powers and not be bound to the curses. […] We failed to figure out how to properly denounce our realms, but, after you broke the curses, we realized you could be the answer to all of our problems. You could break the current system of rule.”

305-306

Maren continues to explain that they believe Isla is immune to curses as a flair, and that by her being the ruler of Wildling and Starling, she has ‘inadvertently freed two realms from being tied to her life’. Maren then goes on to say their ultimate plan is for Isla to kill Oro so she may break the Nexus curse for all the realms.

I briefly had to touch on this in my lore overview at the start of all this, and here’s the full context. A bunch of stuff in this is, however, wrong to how we have previously established the world functions.

By the sounds of it, a Sunling king got a Nightshade to make the Nexus curse, which made it impossible for people to disavow their realm at all. It also made it so people could only have one elemental power type even if they had a dual heritage. It sounds like it is also why when a ruler dies, their people dies- as a way to prevent the people from ever dreaming of overthrowing their ruler.

As far as I can tell, this is the only way it makes sense, but I have to mention certain other implied facts. It seems like before the Nexus curse, Ancient Creatures and the Vinderland Vikings all were able to disavow their realm many thousands of years ago. To be realm-less is to be powerless, but also not at all connected to the health of your ruler. It meant too they were immune to the curses. Since the Nexus curse, it is impossible to renounce your ties to your realm.

This sounds like it makes sense, but it doesn’t. For one, it implies that the people were already tied to their realms and rulers before the Nexus curse, the Nexus curse just maybe introduced the death side effect to revolution. If people were already so tied to their realms and rulers that disavowing them would fully remove your magic, then clearly the link between rulers and realms was always there and powerful. The Nexus seems way less important because it was already somewhat in place. The people of Lightlark never had a choice.

Overall though, as I said, I like the concept of divine right of kings being subverted to be a curse. The renouncing thing just doesn’t match what we were just told.

Now, onto breaking the Nexus curse. Maren asserts the revolution believes Isla has accidentally broken the Nexus curse twice now. I sure would like to know their reasoning for that! The idea is that Isla is the link between the Nexus curse and her people, sort of a link on the chain or a filter which Nexus must fall through. It really helps to make sense of Lightlark’s power system if you think of it through fluid dynamics. Power trickles down from Isla to her people and she effects what that power looks like. The revolution believe that Isla is curse immune, this means the Nexus curse doesn’t apply to her and thus to her people either.

There’s no proof of this, and I have to say, the only way this lore works is if we assume Maren is just stupid and wrong here. The Nexus curse has two effects: if a ruler dies their people die, and people can only have one set of powers. We can’t test the former but we can the latter. The Newlands seem very segregated, but Lightlark itself is not, and there have to be a number of inter-realm romances and children who, if Nexus was over, should have sudden access to new realm powers.

It’d be extremely notable if this happened, and it isn’t mentioned, so it didn’t. The Nexus curse is still active on Isla and Maren is wrong.

What we can believe logically, at least, is that Oro has to die. The curse is woven to his Origin(al) bloodline and he is probably the focal point. If Isla took his powers entirely it’d include his Origin powers, which would include the hub of the Nexus curse, which then… might break it.

It really depends on how you view the curse, though. Is it a curse that purely lives in the hub of Oro, or is Oro just the curse filter, trickling it down to his people? In the latter case, that has more world-breaking implications. After all, if Isla’s curse breaking flair can effect everyone below her on the power hierarchy, the Wildlings would have been immune to curses from the moment she was born. Same with Grim and his curse immune necklace. So it must be that the curse lives and functions solely through Oro.

The other realms links to Oro and Nexus are unsaid and also mysterious. The Nexus curse was put on Oro’s family line, but all realms are subject to its effects. Did every ruler at the time ask to also be included in the Nexus? Was it sprung on them as a surprise? I suppose it implies again a trickle-down system where Oro is above the other realms, and so the curse on him is passed to lesser rulers who aren’t Origins, and then passed to the people. It starts to look eerily like a pyramid scheme at this point. I don’t know what that implies. I just know Isla isn’t a stopgap here for the flow of curses.

The Nexus curse also changes a bunch of stuff about how we understand book one. For one, are love bonds immune to Nexus? By the rules we get in that one sentence, they shouldn’t be, but both Oro and Isla are able to use other realms powers through their love bond. But then, Oro and Isla are the two who are immune to Nexus! We have no idea how it shakes out then.

Aurora and the Nexus curse. Aurora was immune to the Centennial curse because she formed it, but she should have been subject to the Nexus still. She’s able to steal all the realms powers using Bondmaker without issue, meaning Bondmaker is immune to Nexus. But Bondmaker is an entire can of worms.

Bondmaker and power transference

Bondmaker is the giant needle from the first book. Here’s the explanation from the plot twist corner of old.

“This is a bondmaker. The only enchanted device that allows a transfer of ability. Created to help Sunling kings shift their power to their heirs without having to die.”

Lightlark, 330

I’ve been capitalizing Bondmaker as an important item, but strictly speaking it is lower case… and an ‘a’, not a ‘the’. There’s multiple of these, I guess, though Aurora couldn’t find a one in 500 years.

Bondmaker is capable of defying the Nexus curse it seems, as Aurora can use it to briefly have all the realms’ power. Okay. It’s also the only kind of magic item that allows a transfer of ability, which is just a lie. In Nightbane, Azul says this:

“There are other ways to have an heir, beyond the obvious,” Azul said. “It is possible for rulers to transfer power, through a love bond, or special relics.” Like the bondmaker, Isla thought. “The cost is high, however. Permanently transferring ability shortens a ruler’s life significantly.”

29

Alright, so Bondmaker is a ‘the’ now. Also, it’s no longer the only relic that can transfer power. The only way to explain stuff like this is that doesn’t rely on calling Aster a poor writer not bothering to keep track of her own lore is to just assume Azul, Aurora, or everyone is just constantly incorrect.

We understand power transference and inheritance like this: a ruler has a big pool of power that lets them live forever. If they have an heir, it starts a power exchange over an unknown period of time where the last ruler ages as their child does, and eventually dies. The more children or grandchildren you have, the faster you wither away, as the ruler power pool is depleted. You also can do an instant transfer: a love bond allows a ruler to send all their power to someone else permanently or have it stolen. Azul also implies that maybe you can have a platonic familial love bond with an adopted child and give them your power, but that’s not confirmed.

So. Power transference. Have a child or use an item to speed up the process. Either ways, without power you age and die. This seems to only be the case for rulers, but in Nightbane, Isla actually notes this:

A man whose flesh hung off his bones like the skins in the shop towered before her. He looked old, which meant he either had generations of children or had been alive more than a millennium.

163

I honestly don’t know what to do with this information, lads. The implication has always been that the heir stuff only really applied to rulers, not everyone. We’ll just entirely ignore this concept for now.

Bondmaker, though. The cost of it is said to be blood, but this was probably a lie by Aurora, as when it’s used it doesn’t particularly drain Isla to the dregs. It has been used before, after all, by Sunling kings. To do- what?

We already know the moment your baby is born, you start to die. A Sunling king is not immune to this. Bondmaker allows for a clean transference of power, but a new Sunling Origin baby starts the transfer process the second it is born. Using Bondmaker would speed it up, but it shouldn’t cancel the already ongoing death side effect. Perhaps all Sunling heirs have been adopted, then, and given heir status with the Bondmaker?

But if the Bondmaker really works as we’re told it works, there should be a pretty long and obvious history of immortal Sunling kings. They are immortal unless they have an heir, Bondmaker apparently removes that death effect, we should be drowning in Sunling kings. Certainly everyone in the realms should notice something was up when Sunlings were the only ones not dying whenever they had an heir.

But I guess everyone forgot, which everyone is constantly doing. The timeline of Lightlark is a mess, certainly many thousands of years long and definitely not planned out ahead of time. The Centennial was 500 years ago, which is recent history to these immortal nations of immortal rulers and nearly immortal people. Despite the meaningless nature of time to this world, pretty much everything has been forgotten. People forgot about Bondmaker, people forgot you could revoke your realm loyalty or that Nexus wasn’t always in effect. People forgot they came from a whole other world, what dreks were, that Lightlark itself was built on a giant portal. Characters conveniently discover these historical facts as the plot demands, but the world as a whole are amnesiacs. It’s frankly impossible for this much incredibly important weird world-changing lore to have been utterly lost to time. Especially since history as we know it is very sparse beyond these huge revelations. What even happened two thousand years ago but the status quo? Who is failing to write any of this static but drawn out history down?

Love Bonds and Isla

The history is a mess, but so is the present. Comparing the two books highlights how much the lore feels tacked on top of, not gently revealed. I don’t think Aster planned any of this ahead of time, she only is constructing it backwards from new ideas and people pointing out plot holes. Try to convince me this bit isn’t another direct response to people making fun of book one. Isla and Azul are speaking.

“Your realm’s curse…”

“Was one of the better ones,” he filled in.

Not being able to fly for five hundred years certainly must have been terrible for a society that had clearly woven their power through the fabric of their day-to-day, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as dying at twenty-five or eating hearts to survive. That didn’t mean it wasn’t deadly, though.”

“Azul, the day it happened-”

“We lost many of our people. They all just… fell from the sky.”

Isla closed her eyes. The thought of them, without explanation, falling to their deaths… she clutched Azul’s wrist harder.

“Flying comes naturally to us; even those with the smallest shred of power can do it. Those who weren’t skilled enough- or quick enough- to use wind to cushion their fall… perished.”

27

Ultimately this isn’t related to the subject at all, I just didn’t want to fail to include the bit where Isla and Azul look to the reader and directly say ‘stop making fun of the fact the skylings only can’t fly. They died guys. It was very sad’. Also, the cadence of ‘they all just… fell from the sky’ is exactly like that reddit post about the guy whose dog herded a flock of sheep into the sea. They all just… disappeared into the sea.

Lightlark and Nightbane don’t really care about consistency or logic, but I’m still here and I’m still kicking. Isla and love bonds: why does she need to learn how to access power and steal power through her love bond this book, when in Lightlark it’s established the entire goal her guardians had raised her for was to do exactly that with Oro? Isla was raised extremely specifically by Aurora’s to seduce Oro, in order to steal his powers. In Nightbane, a point is made that she has to learn what love bonds feel like and how to properly access them. She ought to know this already, right?

It’s similar to how Isla is portrayed in the Nightshade flashbacks as rather shy to sexuality. The girl was literally raised with seduction as her final purpose in life, on the island of naked sexually free wild people. In both cases, it feels like the book is trying to keep Isla very neutrally relatable rather than consider how her backstory might at all impact the present.

Power sharing and heirs and all of this worldbuilding is actually very important to say, reading and potentially enjoying this book. These are not little mysteries I’m stuck on but key aspects of how anything functions. I can’t appropriately appreciate a twist or new lore if it just confuses me. A good fictional world will be such that you could imagine an event happening and predict how that would unfold in universe. God, that’s just a generic way of putting it, but-

A world should have an intrinsic logic to it that allows extrapolation. Rules should be predictable enough that you can have fun with loopholes or imagining what would happen if a certain event happened within the bounds of them. In Lightlark, literally anything could happen as a result of any action. There are no rules. The points don’t matter.

The rules of magic

The fundamental hole in the heart of Lightlark’s lore is something that bugged me for a long time, and I’ve finally figured it out. Lightlark is both a world with extremely hard rule-based magic while also being deeply lax and allegorical. These are two near opposite poles of how magic systems can function, and they don’t function together.

Magic in Lightlark is often somewhat metaphorical, very fairy-tale-esque. When you fall in love, you share so much of yourself even your power is shared- and if you fall in love unwisely, that power can literally be used against you. The heavily symbolic role of being a ruler is one that takes a literal turn where the people truly rely on their king to live, and the life of the king is that of the people. There’s even a Fisher King element to it, where rulers must inject their power into the land, and when Lightlark suffers Oro also does.

Things like the egg-sun-heart of Lightlark are similarly very symbolic fantasy. In Nightbane, it’s pointed out that Isla was shot in the heart last book and that ‘split it in two’, dividing her literally and metaphorically between Grim and Oro, dark and light. This sort of magic is what you see in fantasy realism, and isn’t meant to work to a scientific scale- it’s far more about emotions and vibes. It’s not my favourite, but it’s a thing.

The issue is that the world is also very specific on its rules. The rules don’t add up, but there are a lot of them. Everyone is under several layers of curses that dictate what they can and cannot do. The curses can be broken but only under specific, fairly literal means. Rather than it just being that the king and the land are tied in a fancy metaphorical way, the king is literally tied to the land with an explicit curse that functions in a highly specific way.

The metaphorical, flowing aspect of this sort of magic does not work when boxed up, and as poor as Lightlark is at creating effective rules, it still has them. A lot of them. It wants to have both cakes and at this point simply cannot. You can’t predict anything in this universe because any action might have consequences either symbolic or literal and there is no way to guess which.

It’s that which really makes it such a frustrating series to read and discuss at length. I’ve talked a lot with my flatmate on this one, trying to remember plot holes, prove or disprove that they are even holes, and at every point it relies on me pulling up a paragraph of text and coming to several different conclusions. I’ve dealt with a lot of highly convoluted lore, but Lightlark is uniquely fucked.

Characters

Grim and his magic necklace

At this point I’ve talked a lot about Grim and Oro and romance, but there’s still room for some asides. Like the magic not cursed immovable necklace Grim gave Isla in Lightlark, and how it’s revealed to be a wedding ring equivalent this book. Which she again, can never take off.

Going back to Lightlark, we can appreciate the scene it is first introduced.

“I’m thinking…” he said darkly. Thinking what? He reached for her.

And blinked. His entire expression changed.

The hand he had reached toward her now reached inside his pocket.

“…That I have something for you.” He pulled out a necklace. It had a dark chain, holding a black diamond as large as a plum.

Isla’s eyebrows came together. He was giving her jewelry? She didn’t know what to say. Her face was still hot. The diamond was beautiful, but she didn’t want a gem- she wanted him, pressed against her. Immediately.

Grim grinned, sensing everything. He looked ready to take her into his arms once more but seemed to think better of it, because he turned his attention to his gift. “May I?”

She nodded, hoping he didn’t mistake her disapointment for not liking his present. She lifted her hair, and he clasped the necklace into place, tight around her neck, his fingers lingering for just a moment.

“I know you are more than capable of protecting youtself,” he said, head bent low, breath against her nearly bare shoulder. “But should you ever need me, touch this. And I will come for you.”

Lightlark, 213-214

So there wasn’t consent, is what I’m saying. He then turns the necklace invisible, and Isla is wearing it from then on.

I can’t think of a single defense for Grim giving Isla this necklace. He is more than capable of coming to Isla’s aid from anywhere, as he constantly does. He definitely could create or offer another magic item to fulfill a similar role. Yet he gives the wife whose memories he removed a necklace which she can never remove under false pretenses.

During, again, the plot of Lightlark when he’s meant to not be seducing Isla so she can seduce Oro. Grim really just can’t help himself, and reading any amount of Lightlark again for this video is torturous. This scene is also the one with the weird hell portal thing, which on second read sounds like it might just be the oceon. But it also might be a portal. It’s just never clarified and never mentioned again. Tell me your hot takes:

They must have been at the base of the castle- underground, maybe. Orbs holding white light crowded the corners of the room, floating like balloons. The walls were arched, held up by columns, and beyond them sat a slice of dark water like a piece of the nighttime sky trapped below.

It shimmered, startling her, and she took a step back.

212

I read this and processed it forever as them being underground in a dark basement and her seeing between two arches a portal of darkness and stars, rather like how her Starstick summons. It might literally just be the sea, but then why would Isla startled so much? Why would it shimmer? I think this is some sort of portal. But is it?

No, really, someone, please help me. If it is a portal, it seems like something we would have heard of by now. I certainly would have assumed it was the way back to the old world if not for the fact that winds up being in Isla’s Lightlark house for some reason.

Anyway, this is the scene where Isla is given a necklace she doesn’t want or understand by Grim. It’s later referred to as having a diamond the size of a small potato in another scene, cementing its place in YA history as the small potato necklace.

Grim should not have done this. Grim is not a very good person.

But as I’ve said, I don’t think that makes him a villain. I think he’s an anti-hero who just is also extremely abusive to his wife. Grim’s broader plot actions are never wrong and truly seem to be for the greater good in Nightbane. He kidnaps Isla’s people for their own good and they love it. He tells Isla he’ll love her later and she does. He wants to return to the previous world only for her and doesn’t want to kill innocents in the process. He just will if they resist him.

But with Isla, that edgy but correct veneer changes to just being a bad husband. He can’t leave Isla alone during the Centennial and blows it all. He removes her memories without discussing it or her consent. He gives her a marriage necklace when she has no way to consent at the time to what that means. He’s never in any rush to explain anything to her, only that he knows best and she’ll realize he was right. Eventually.

If she just does what he wants and says.

Grim is bad. I do not like Grim.

Even in their enemies to lovers flashback arc, Grim is simply unpleasant. He is jealous and possessive of Isla immediately, even when he refuses to actually be with her and is actively planning to kill her. He’s sexually aggressive and constantly teasing Isla, only to reject her last second. Their bond is much less mutual interest and good feelings and mostly him unloading his trauma while she drools over his abs.

Grim and Oro and the not-choice

Grim is meant to represent something to Isla, and that is a choice. It’s the same with Oro, and the principle of a lot of love triangles in theory. If you’re going to have a plot where two people are in love with the same girl who must chose, the two potential endgame people will represent something to the lead. It’s not subtle in Nightbane, especially when multiple characters explicitly tell Isla she has to make a choice between Oro and Grim, and that the choice will define all of history.

Grim is dark and Oro is light. Grim saw Isla murder a bunch of innocent people by accident and still loves her, even though she thinks she’s a monster for it. Oro hears of this and tells her she simply made a mistake and isn’t one. Grim loves her in spite of it, Oro tells her there is nothing to spite. Grim is a villain who sees Isla as a villain too, while Oro sees Isla as a lovely girl he cares for deeply.

Grim is going to win this one. On one hand, Grim’s storyline might be the more interesting one if it lived up to the premise. Isla could have a full villain arc and rule next to Grim as the queen of shadows in a plainly evil way. Maybe Isla could have reverse character development, fully commit warcrimes and not mind because she chose darkness. I hate Grim, but otherwise it’s at least… a direction. A choice. A commitment.

On the other hand, Oro is the better love interest. He’s a self care king who doesn’t even have sex with Isla while she’s having an identity crisis because he knows it isn’t healthy for her to ignore her problems in favor of a relationship they haven’t defined yet. Oro is right that Isla accidentally overdoing it with her powers is not the same as being a monster. Oro is supportive and loving and reasonable and absolutely about to self sacrifice himself next book and leave Isla all his powers so she can end game with her soulmate Grim.

Nightbane talks a lot about Isla being split between the boys, torn in half literally within her heart, but there is no choice. The first half of the book is heavy on Oro, but it’s Grim all the way down. Remember Oro’s ‘of mice and men beach oral sex’ scene? He ain’t making it and even he seems aware of it. Isla is picking Grim.

And Isla picking Grim- the inevitability of it and how Nightbane doesn’t even pretend anything else could ever happen- means Isla isn’t really picking Grim. She’s not choosing his side, his argument that she is a monster like him, that she belongs to the dark… she is merely destined by the narrative for Grim. She has no agency in this because the book hasn’t presented any of it like a choice.

I was frankly extremely surprised Oro lived this long. It’s interesting: in a better series I might note how both the ending of Lightlark and Nightbane are the same, but Isla’s choice differs. In one she picks Oro and Grim is sad but accepting, in the second she picks Grim and Oro is sad but accepting. In a better world, book three will end with Isla picking both Grim and Oro and them both being accepting of this. It’d also fulfill her role as being both life and death, day and night at the same time… but I highly doubt that’s where we’re going. Especially with the Nexus curse being introduced. Oro ain’t living.

If you, since I’m long enough in here for this now, want to read a series where the above does happen, I’ll just suggest The Black Witch Chronicles by Laurie Forest. High Fantasy with complicated rules and weird magic that all still works out. Extremely romance heavy YA that even a romance-disliker like myself enjoys. Increasing diversity and social awareness as a huge cast of characters team up to fight magic facism. There’s sexy dragon shapeshifters, which I understand are suddenly huge now, and the love triangle legitimately resolves with the love triangle accepting their accidental three way dragon marriage of immense power. Good stuff. Not perfect, but it’s miles above Lightlark.

Side characters?

Does Nightbane have side characters? Sort of. Last time I ran through the other rulers individually, at this point there is not much use. We know who these clowns are, and we also know they don’t really matter. Azul is here until he isn’t. Cleo is a mysterious threat until she simply turns up and explains her motivations to Isla. Maren serves the plot and Oro’s friends serve nothing.

It’s only a slight stretch to call the entire supporting cast superfluous to everything else. In Lightlark it was less so, but in Nightbane between the rushed present and the long Grim-centric past, it’s true. Isla, Oro, and Grim are the only characters who feel they have an independent agenda and interests from the plot. Enya arranges the Wildling economy and has a backstory, but does she change ever? Does she react or grow or do anything but be a named face in the crowd? It’s the same with Cleo or Azul. As much as they both technically do things, they also never feel like people. They’re almost here out of obligation.

Yet when we turn our gaze to the lead trio, the same problem still haunts things. In Lightlark, I called Oro the only character who really had an arc. In this one, it’s only Isla.

Isla

Oro begins the book confused but in love with Isla and ends it less confused and more in love. Grim begins the book off on an island in love with Isla and ends it on a different island in love with Isla.

Isla has an arc about getting over her depression. She changes her mind about Grim as she regains her memories. She thinks she’s a bad ruler and seems vaguely to think she’s an okay ruler by the end. Girl is going through things, at the very least. Are they what I would call well written arcs? Do they feel natural and are they given enough time to develop in an interesting and realistic manner?

No, obviously. They do happen though.

Isla this book is less of an over the top mary sue, and because of that there’s less to say about her. She’s still riding giant jungle cats into battle with her perfect mastery of life and death, but it’s not as dramatic as Lightlark. On one hand, better writing. On the other, rather boring. I don’t know what to say about Isla at this point or what personality traits I would even pin on her. Impulsive and naive and emotionally immature, I guess.

Nightbane tries to acknowledge Isla more as flawed, but it also is afraid to show her as too weak. As much as she doesn’t know how to rule, people who call her out on that are considered assholes. As much as she is impulsive and dramatic, Oro is prepared to babysit her until she calms down. She blames herself for a lot of things during her depression arc, and it’s great she learns to like herself, but she never really improves any of her flaws in the process.

It’s like Isla’s flaws are things only she is allowed to fully perceive. Most people around her see her as near perfect, especially her love interests. So when Isla is made to confront the fact she may have flaws during her depression arc, the crux is not overcoming her flaws but seeing herself as Oro does. As just kind of perfect, no real work needed.

I like the notion of Isla’s depression arc and flaw realization, but I just don’t think it actually works.

SEDUCTIVE HAUNTS

I forgot about seductive haunts the first time I wrote this review. Somehow. It’s extremely key.

So, when Nightbane was first announced I did a little like, 1am video reading the summary and discussing it and the cover. Let’s actually talk about the blurb now, at the end of things:

Isla Crown has secured the love of two powerful rulers and broken the curses that plagued the six realms for centuries, but few know the true origins of her powers. Now, in the wake of a crushing betrayal, Isla finds herself hungry for distraction, preferring to frequent Lightlark’s seductive haunts instead of embracing her duties as the newly crowned leader of two separate realms. Worse, her fellow rulers haven’t ceded victory quietly, and there are others in Isla’s midst who don’t believe her ascent to power was earned. As certain death races toward Lightlark and secrets from the past begin to unravel, Isla must weigh her responsibility to her people against the whims of the most dangerous traitor of all: her heart.

I discussed in Lightlark how the summary wasn’t accurate, and Nightbane is much the same. Do people care about the origins of her powers? Absolutely not, every scene with it revealed is skipped over and no one reacts with any particular emotion to the news. Is Isla hungry for distraction? Yes, she tries to bone Oro instead of train for a while. But does she frequent Lightlar’s

SEDUCTIVE

HAUNTS?

No! She does not!

One of my predictions was excitement for dumb night clubs, and Nightbane heard my pleas and turned away from my anguish. There are no haunts to be had here, seductive or unsexy. Isla does not frequent anything on Lightlark but the fields where Oro trains her. 

Obviously we can also discuss the rest- the other rulers have ceded victory quietly, actually, and the people who don’t think her ascet to power was earned don’t matter. Certain death is Grim racing towards Lightlark, I guess, but Isla isn’t weighing responsibility at all, just her libido. So it’s all pretty wrong, obviously.

But the Seductive Haunts thing. What happened? Where did they go?

This blurb is the official one. It’s on the dust jacket, it’s on all the web sites. It references something which is simply not in the book to any capacity. You can squint and pretend the rest is, but these haunts? These seductions? Missing!

Authors don’t write blurbs for big books like this, generally, but they do get to weigh in and approve them. A bunch of other people familiar with the book also get to approve them. Everyone look at the LACK of SEDUCTIVE HAUNTS and just nodded. It’s a failure of the industry. It’s a disgrace. 

That girl SHOULD be at the club! I was promised what sounded like stupid out of place fantasy clubbing, and it makes sense it got cut, but why leave it in the blurb like that? Why let your sins shine so brightly, so exposed, your lies so blatant they cut?

Why isn’t she at the club. I want her to be at the club.

Why why why why why? Why did this happen? What do we do here?

I, very, very, keenly, do not follow social media around Lightlark and I have no interest in that. The media hype around it is quite over to my knowledge, though she’s certainly been around promoting it. Lightlark was a viral smash, but it wasn’t good, and I suspect the sales figures will reflect the fact a lot of people have entirely lost interest in it over the past year. Fans and haters included.

The fact there will be a third then is a fun twist on matters. Rarely do viral meme materials demand so much money and time and last so long after their true relevance. Will anyone buy book three? Will book three be called like, ‘Duskflower?’ I’m taking bets. Is book three even the last? I sure hope so.

I had to buy Nightbane for this, which I plainly didn’t for Lightlark. I was eager to and successfully read it the day it came out in one sitting, though it’s taken me much longer to work this review together. It’s a pain referencing a physical book, and at this point I think my receipt has expired and I won’t even be able to get my money back. When I was buying Nightbane, I was accidentally the first person in the store, and I found out Fourth Wing 2 was released the same day. Fourth Wing is a much more recent booktok phenomenon, to a greater degree because its hype has been far less impacted by critique. People generally like it, I don’t know if I’ll ever bother looking at it. It’s dragon smut. It’s sequel came out faster than Lightlark’s did, though, and certainly the other people there on opening were all buying it.

I am in many ways a life support system right now for this series. Especially as I fully intend to suffer through the next one. We feed each other, Aster and I, a symbiotic pair. But without videos like mine, how well do you think Lightlark would have stuck it in the internet’s collective memory? I feel like book three will be almost a divergent movie scenario, where it will be more contract than fan demand that brings the finished product to us. And similarly, it may be cut off entirely without being completed.

Nightbane is setting up a much larger world than Lightlark, with much higher magic. I think it’s probably going to go full fey, as so so many books do, and at that point it’s easy to imagine Aster going true SJM and wanting more sequels set in the same universe. I just don’t believe we’ll see anything past the third book, and I don’t think the third book is going to peaking too high on the bestsellers list. Nightbane came in around slot 6 with 22,000 books sold, a far cry from Lightlark’s debut. We don’t have access to a lot more information though about publishing and sales, because it’s still a very closed industry in that regard.

This section is where I search for a ‘why’, but unlike Lightlark, there isn’t one. Lightlark had a whole story behind it, tiktok and algorithms and undeserved fame and success. Nightbane has none of that and it’s still here on my doorstep like an unwanted mouse. I don’t want this. You don’t want this. Who wants this?

Yet it’s here, and it’ll continue.

It’ll just continue.

Why not?

What am I supposed to do about it?

Conclusion

Oh boy. In many ways, I just wrote out my conclusion. But here we are.

Nightbane is not a very good book. Sorry if this shocks you. Lightlark was not a very good book either. It has not gotten better and I don’t trust the author to nail it on the third try.

What Lightlark is, I guess, winds up being a pretty good look at the modern publishing industry as it stands right now. Marketing books has always been a nightmare. Books are a nightmare.

What sells? For a long time, YA was merely an age group. A bit before 2010, YA started to be seen more as a genre with the rise of series like Hunger Games and Divergent and Twilight. The industry rushed to imitate what worked, because it made money.

Most books don’t make a lot of money. Publishing is extremely expensive up and down the chain, and it’s not just authors who don’t earn much money. A successful book, however, pays for all the less successful books. A key author like Stephen King will nearly single-highhandedly be keeping a publisher afloat.

Cashing in on trends is an attempt to squeeze money from a very tough stone. Paranormal faded into dystopia which faded into dark fantasy. Social media began to grow and grow in the 2010s, and suddenly that was what determined what people read. Things like booktube. Bookstagram. Book-whatever. Word of mouth has always been far more influential on readers than an advertising campaign, and trends started being more dictated by social media… and independent indie books too.

Amazon made it incredibly easy for people to publish and distribute their work, especially things with far more adult content than would typically have passed in traditional publishing. Works like 50 Shades of Grey, originally small press published, helped illustrate a niche mainstream publishing wasn’t fulfilling enough. So they started doing it.

The mid 2010s had a big focus on fey and royalty, a theme which still is persisting in the fantasy YA space quite heavily. The content of these books is increasingly adult, with ever older lead characters. The rise of tiktok and booktok helps cement why: everyone is just extremely horny all the time now, I guess. Every booktok trend is based on SPICE and explicit sex that really doesn’t fly under the YA term but is often lumped into it because it’s a more approachable niche than adult fantasy.

And here we get Lightlark. It promises things based on trends. It appeals to the thirsty tiktok masses. It calls to aesthetics, and most importantly it is a shiny new thing. The internet and publishing both love this: shiny new things that might make money.

Lightlark is far more YA than some books often promoted on booktok as YA, but it still sits right here at the end of my rough timeline as the true culmination of it all. Hype and spice and the hope to catch a trend before it forms so publishing can make some money off it.

Now we have Nightbane.

It is not a shiny new thing, now. Lightlark did not revolutionize the market, nor has it left a mark. If anything, it has taught publishers to be even a little bit more cautious about assuming an upcoming title will be the next big thing… but publishers will keep blowing cash on books like Lightlark anyway. They have to, because when it pays off it’s worth it.

Nightbane though is adjacent to all this talk of markets and trends. Nightbane is a sequel and it is here. It merely sits and exists and we all have to scratch our heads with what to do about that. It is not new and is does not reinvent a book no one particularly liked. It exists.

It’s here.

It has about as much depth as lorem ipsum.

But it exists, doesn’t it? We all just have to accept that and try to figure out what that means together.

• Review
• Zero stars