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Black City (Black City #1) by Elizabeth Richards - Review


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In Black City, humans and Darklings are segregated by a high wall after tensions between the two races simmer after the end of the war. Ash is a twin-blood, half-human and half-Darkling, who lives with his father on the human side of the wall. Natalie is a human Sentry and the daughter of the Emissary, a representative for their state under the country's leader. Ash and Natalie should hate each other, avoid each other, or even want to kill each other, but they find themselves inexplicably drawn together and falling in love.

Black City by Elizabeth Richards has promising opening chapters. I've always been a sucker for a vampire story, so I was most interested in the Darklings. Setting the story in a dystopian world was also an intriguing choice. I enjoyed the first one hundred pages well enough. They had a Legend by Marie Lu meets The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black with a dash of the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling thrown in the mix. Not incredibly original or anything, but still plenty interesting.

Unfortunately, I couldn't really get all that invested in any of the characters, especially Natalie - we spend quite a bit of time with her and she quickly began to grate on my nerves. However, my biggest issue with this book is the forbidden instalove. If done well, it doesn't bother me all that much, but in this case it completely took over the story (imagine Romeo and Juliet multiplied by Twilight). I don't do this often when I'm as far into a book as I was here, but I gave up on page 175 which is nearly half way through the novel. It started to go downhill around page 100, but I kept torturing myself thinking it would have to get better, but it never did - I probably came out of with eye strain from all of the eye rolling I did over the course of those 75 pages. For a book that began with such promise, everything that it had going for it went downhill very, very quickly.

Final verdict:



I read this book from June 5 - 9, 2015 and my review is also on Goodreads.

Comments

  1. This book was so hyped when it came out that I picked it up right away! Sadly, I also had the same feelings toward the book as you. The ideas were great, but the stupid insta-love took over the book and I just couldn't enjoy it!

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    1. I had never even heard of this until a couple of months ago when I saw it at Ollie's and it caught my interest (and it was like $2).

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  2. I'm sorry you didn't like it :( I read it when it came out a kind of long time ago before I had read all that much insta-love so it didn't bother me as much. I imagine if I read it again I would notice it a lot more now that I have more experience with books in general.

    Laura @BlueEyeBooks

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    1. The more I see it the more it gets to me - if I read it when I was younger it probably wouldn't have bothered me that much either.

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  3. Shame it wasn't any better, especially since you spent so much time reading it only to DNF it. =/ You probably did better than I would have though. The fact that it's a vamp story with instalove would have had me "nope"-ing from the first few chapters. XD

    Great review, as always! ^-^

    Brittany @ http://www.spacebetweenthespines.com/

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    1. Thanks!

      Well, see it started off great. I didn't expect the instalove angle at all until around 100+ pages in, so I was already invested in it an the characters and everything. Around that point things started to get suspicious, like I was starting to wonder if that was the route it was indeed going to take and then boom! the characters are practically drooling all over each other. *sigh*

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