Innocent Darkness (DNF)

Innocent Darkness
Author: Suzanne Lazear
Series: The Aether Chronicles (#1)
Publisher: Flux
How Received: BookExpo America

Wish. Love. Desire. Live.

Sixteen-year-old Noli Braddock's hoyden ways land her in an abusive reform school far from home. On mid-summer's eve she wishes to be anyplace but that dreadful school. A mysterious man from the Realm of Faerie rescues her and brings her to the Otherworld, only to reveal that she must be sacrificed, otherwise, the entire Otherworld civilization will perish.

Got to page: 180

There's always that moment when I have to decide if I'm going to review a book or not, especially if it's a did-not-finish. Mostly it depends on whether or not I have a lot of thoughts on it.

For this one, it's because I adore Suzanne Lazear. She's hilarious and fabulous; I designed bookmarks and banners for her; I love her.

And I do still love the plot of this book. But there comes a point in every author's life where somebody they're close to isn't going to completely adore something they've written. This might be that time.

Like I said, the plot for Innocent Darkness is excellent. I adore it. But I had a few problems with it that had me putting it down again and again until I hit page 180 and I finally had to stop.

The first one was the writing style itself. Most people wouldn't have a problem with it, I think; because I knew Lazear, I was being hyper-sensitive to how it was written. Lazear favors Oxford commas. I can normally tune them out except for how often they were used -- there were a lot of descriptive sentences that, rather than weave the description into the story itself, simply told what the description looked like.

(Lazear also favors, "Also, blah blah this thing," which is something that threw me off.)

The only other issue I had with it, outside of writing style, was - you guessed it! - insta-love! While I went into Innocent Darkness suspecting a whole bunch of sexual tension and sexy times, I didn't expect the Fae that whirls her into the Otherworld and spends all of three weeks with her to suddenly fall in love with her.

No, the real problem lay in the fact that he'd fallen in love with the very girl he had to kill.

I wish there had been more set-up for something like that, or even no love at all and just a severe lust and protectiveness. (The fact that Lazear set up a love triangle also made me sadface. Why couldn't it be just V that loved her and the Fae being all OH HEY LOOK I AM SEXY YOU WANT TO SLEEP WITH ME OH YES.)

Final Comments: Great plot and I love how Noli refuses to trap herself in the stereotypes of her time period, but insta-love and the Oxford commas made me have to put this down.

Have you guys read Innocent Darkness?