Book Review | The Night Hunt

The Night Hunt by Alexandra Christo is a YA dark fantasy that follows Atia, a monster who feeds on fear, and the very last of her kind. Seeking revenge, she reluctantly teams up with an amnesiatic Herald in order to slay the corrupt gods that killed her family.

I was initially drawn in by the stunning cover, but the actual contents of the book left something to be desired.

For starters, the writing is extremely choppy, disjointed, and lacks any sense of using sentence length and punctuation to build up suspense and emotional impact.

Let's take a look at one section here:

The Herald peers over the body, taking a moment to assess.
Then he turns to me.
“Monster of mischief,” he says.
Like I’ve just made his day longer.
"I should leave."

Every single paragraph here is short and one sentence long, reading more like a rough first draft before a scene is later fleshed out. I'd understand if this was for a fast fighting scene or if a writer is trying to indicate various sounds, but no, the sentence lengths serve no purpose here. Instead I feel like gaps and details are missing—like actually describing the dead body the Herald is examining, which would have helped ground the readers into the scene and

paint a mental picture.

On top of that, the worldbuilding feels thoughtless and lazy. Places are haphazardly named generic things like "Earth Kingdom" and "Fire Kingdom" without building in an elemental magic system along the lines of Avatar the Last Air Bender. Since the monsters and mythology of this world are Greek and Celtic inspired, it would have made more cohesive sense for that to have influenced the names of locations as well.

Honestly, this book falls short from what I’d expect from a professionally published book and I feel like it would have benefited greatly from more technical and developmental editing.

Thank you, NetGalley and Feiwel Friends, for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Book Details:

Publication Date : October 10, 2023

Publisher : ‎Feiwel Friends

ISBN: 1250897440

Pages : 384

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