ARC Review: Dark Breaks the Dawn by Sara B. Larson

I decided to take a break from the #AsianLitBingo reading challenge to read Dark Breaks the Dawn by Sara B. Larson. It officially releases on May 30th and the ever wonderful Emma of  Miss Print was kind enough to pass her ARC on to me. Other than the cover, which is very eye catching, the synopsis sounded interesting.

I had trouble getting in to the story for the first 1/3 of the book. I'm used to fantasy authors making up their own names for countries, races, and people's personal names, but the names in this book were hard to get used to and felt obviously fake. This point was driven home by the fact that the main character had a rather normal name, Evelayn. It was also hard to keep the two kingdoms straight because they were the same race but with different skin and used the same name, Draiolon, to refer to themselves. The fact that the story switched POV's with no warning also made it hard to keep the separate factions straight sometimes.

For all of that, my biggest issue was the world building; there wasn't any. This book would have been better served if it was twice as long and had more world building. As it was, I felt little to no connection with the story because all I ever saw were snippets of the world the characters lived in. Ultimately, I did end up liking Evelayn as a character, which improved my liking of the story a little bit. I gave this book 2 out of 5 stars and passed it on to a friend. I probably won't read the sequel because I'm just not that interested in seeing what happens.