2.5/5

Thanks to NetGalley for providing me an eARC of this book in return for a fair and honest review.

Darkness Unknown follows Everly and her best friend Harper as they return to Everly's childhood home to clean it up and possibly sell it. However, things in Everly's hometown are not what one would call normal. Seeing her old crush attacked (and killed?) by a monster is just the beginning to an adventure that unveils the shadowed part of her town.

My thoughts:

Okay, so this book was kinda confusing, but we will start with the positives. Darkness Unknown does, in fact, have new lore for the existence of werewolves, vampires, and other such creatures. I like the way the "magic" system works in this world, but we need a lot more explanation before I am fully invested. I also love the best friend, Harper. She is a social media influencer and slightly spoiled, but she is still a steadfast and reliable friend to Everly. A few of the other characters show promise but did not have enough exposure for me to fully connect with them in this book.

In contrast, we spend plenty of time with Everly, but I still don't care about her. Her choices and reactions to everything felt very disjointed to me and seemed to only happen to further the plot. Also there is a kind of X-men type mansion for training/fighting the monsters and it is mentioned that the environment there is racist and homophobic, but then nothing more is said about it???

Continuing the theme of not explaining things, Everly's history and about 3 other big mysteries are left unresolved at the end of this book. Now, I understand this is a series, but I need something to be resolved for me to want to continue the series.

Ultimately, this book series could be really good if the mysteries are resolved well, but I'm not sure if the first book was a good introduction to the series.

This was a fun book to read. I really enjoyed the friendship between Everly and Harper and thought the crush that Everly has on Dylan was adorable. I also though French's take on the supernatural creatures was refreshing since it isn't your standard vampire or werewolf story. I'm definitely excited to see what happens next in this series.

This was okay. It was nowhere near as good as I was hoping for because, while the idea behind this world is interesting, the story itself was really rather boring. Worst of all, every (main) character was in their 20's but they all read as if they were young teenagers. Their thoughts and actions were always so immature that it was annoying. And don't get me started on the best friend being a goddamn social media influencer. I can't even tell you how much I hate the fact that that's even a thing. And you expect me to believe that everyone that Everly and Harper come across in this town know who she is? In a town where cell reception is sketchy at best and the internet iffy? Yeah, okay. At least I liked how Harper, while obsessed with her social media appearance, was actually a pretty solid best friend. The girl didn't balk about working or getting dirty, and was always the first to help Everly in any way she could. So yay that she wasn't self-absorbed. There were also random moments of PC pandering going on that came completely out of left field and added nothing to the story.

So it's been four years since Everly left her hometown and is only back now because her mother died and she needs to clean out the house as best she can so that she can sell it and get back to her life. She has five days to do it because that's all she could afford to take off from work. Her best friend, Harper, tags along for a bunch of reasons. The first night there things already start to happen and Everly sees something that can't be real. Her long time crush, Rylan, turning into a vampire and fighting a monster? Appearing to die in her arms? Can't possibly be real. Until the next day when he's gone missing and where he fell is covered in blood. Stranger still, the Rylan in her dreams now seems so much more real and knows things that she couldn't possibly have known.

Cleaning up the house takes a back seat to finding Rylan within a world that Everly was never supposed to know existed. The town my not have a vampire population like the rumors say, but it certainly has enough real monsters to make up for that. Both good and bad. Everly also finds out that she's not entirely human either, though nobody seems to know what she is. With her time there running out, Everly decides she's going to stay as long as she has to to help Rylan and figure out the job thing after. And while at least one good thing comes out of a horrific encounter, the book ends on such a cliff hanger that not a single question is answered. Which is frustrating for me because I do want to know what Everly is, but I don't want to read the next book.

This did not appeal to me at all. I was promised a 'reinvention' of all things paranormal - wherewolves, vampires and such. But what I got was a confusing mish-mash of weird stuff that was never fully explained. The universe was messy and had huge gaps. More than that, the characters are bland non-entities - aside from the two secondary characters, Callan and Harper. They were the only things that made this sort of enjoyable.

✨Darkness Unknown✨

Thank you to Netgalley, the author and the publisher for sending me an e-arc.
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Summary: Darkness Unknown follows Everly, who appears to be early 20s, who returns to her mysterious hometown of Shroudhaven after her estranged mother dies. She stumbles into some trouble when she witnesses her childhood crush/best friend die at the hands of a strange monster. In a desperate attempt to uncover the truth of what happens with Rylan, Everly must reconnect with those she left behind.
✨
Rating (out of 5)
Overall:⭐️⭐️⭐️
Fantasy:🧛🏻‍♀️🧛🏻‍♀️🧛🏻‍♀️
Friendship:👯‍♂️👯‍♂️👯‍♂️

Review:

What drew me to this book was the girl on the cover, it’s not often you get an actual curvy girl MC. It’s refreshing.

Firstly, I can see the appeal of this book, 13 year old me would’ve been all over it and probably would’ve been head of the fandom. It was unique take on a vampire, werewolves and demon kind of book which was intriguing.

Despite the age of the characters this book reads as a very YA, plus some swearing. I found the characters to be quite flat. They felt quite juvenile. I understand it is the first book in the series but something about it felt incomplete and left me frustrated. The information provided was all very vague.

The friendship between Everly and Harper is the stand-out part of this story, they have each others backs regardless and that’s nice to see.

This story holds a lot of potential, the idea was unique, there is a lot of room to build the characters and expand. I really hope to see this in book 2.

This book was addicting from page 1! At the get go, I was drawn in by the mystery of the story. The intriguing thoughts Everly had running through her mind locked me in and I couldn’t stop reading!!

The book is a “To Be Continued”, therefor the story is a cliff hanger... but it left me wanting more!!

I need to know what happens & how the questions are answered!
I’m definitely looking forward to reading book 2! The cover of the book is beautiful and I wish I had a hard copy to display!

Everly returns to her hometown to pack up what is left of her childhood home and sell it. Along with her best friend Harper she has 5 days to do this before she has to return to her job. Everly is nervous as she is still in love with her childhood friend Rylan who she hasn’t seen since she left years earlier. But there is some weird things happening and after Everly witnesses a fight between Rylan and something otherworldly she wakes to find that Rylan has disappeared.
This was something like I have never read before and was hooked from the beginning. All the characters were interesting even the annoying one and this kept me turning the pages. There was enough background laid out that you were not feeling like you were missing anything but you also knew there was more to some of the stories. The interactions between Everly and Rylan were also something that was new to me and had me wondering about what was happening throughout.
I am excited to read the next book to find out what is going on
Thank you to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for a copy of this eARC in exchange for an honest review

This was the first book I have read by this author, and it won't be the last.
I enjoyed getting to know Everly and Harper, and how they counter balance each other, otherwise Everly's self pity wi u ld have been a little too much.
A pretty good take on shifter and things that go bump in the night, I will be keeping an eye out for book 2.

First off, I want to start by saying that I understand why some people would like this book - it's exactly the brand of trope-y Young Adult paranormal romance that would have had me swooning and spinning at the age of fourteen. You have, in no particular order, a capable girl who doesn't know how beautiful she really is, a hot hunky hunk with rippling muscles and inner demons, plenty of jaw clenching, trendy boutique names like "Everly" and "Ryland" and you get the picture.

What initially drew me to the book was the cover - a plus-sized main character, front-and-center, without any mention in the synopsis or throughout the novel about her size? Sign. Me. Up. We need more of that. This book does a great job of normalizing body types simply through the merit of not making it a big deal. Other than the cover art, there really is no indication that Everly is limited in any way by her size, or views herself as something unworthy of friendship and love, which is a direction I feel like a lot of books tend to take when they have a plus-sized main character. I'm not sure if that was the express intent of this book, but that is what I'm inferring from the cover we've been given.

Overall, my rating for this book is two stars. The first reason is that it felt like reading something someone wrote chapter by chapter on Wattpad or FanFiction.net. You easily could have replaced Ryland's name with Harry Styles throughout the entire novel and that would have made just as much sense to me. Everything felt very forcefully stitched together, the plot wasn't well thought out, and in my opinion, the beginning was like being thrown head first down a waterfall - so much going on but barely any time spent explaining, building, or fleshing out. We're just supposed to buy into Everly and Ryland's relationship from page 10 without asking why? Ok. We get it, they were best friends when they were 5, they grew up together, they've secretly loved each other from afar for YEARS. I didn't give a rip. Nothing about the writing or the character-building even attempted to make me give a rip. There were some other things that arose during the beginning of the novel that wrecked the integrity of it from the start - Ryland and Everly's relationship, Everly and Harper's friendship, Everly's glossed over sordid past and trauma from her family and hometown, and let's not forget the fact that every boy in this tiny mysterious small-town just happens to be familiar and head over heels with a fashion blogger and social media influencer, who apparently has "millions" of followers .... right. Do you know who has millions of followers? Actual celebrities. Are you trying to tell me Harper is an actual celebrity, and she is driving a retro camper and hanging out with Everly in Shroudhaven???!

Overall, this was not for me. I detest feeling like I'm reading something that could have been posted for free in the comments of a youtube video, and I don't ever want to read the phrase "furry muscles" again for as long as I live.

DNF @ 45%. This is a really quick read, but it just isn’t working for me. This is a different take on vampires, and could have been good, but it got bogged down. Needs a good editor to help make the story more cohesive and help with continuity and dialogue.

This does have your typical vampire novel feel too it... but with a lot of untypical vampire things. While I tried to stay interested and focus in on the mystery surrounding Everly and her return to her hometown, there were just too many instances of cringeworthy dialogue. I had a hard time really staying engaged in the book and ultimately ended up skim reading to get to the end.