Review: Darkness Before Dawn

Title: Darkness Before Dawn
Author: JA London
Pages: 342
Format: Paperback
Rating: 2 of 5 owls

Summary

Only sunlight can save us.

We built the wall to keep them out, to keep us safe. But it also makes us prisoners, trapped in what's left of our ravaged city, fearing nightfall.

After the death of my parents, it's up to me--as the newest delegate for humanity--to bargain with our vampire overlord. I thought I was ready. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the monsters. Then again, nothing could have prepared me for Lord Valentine . . . or his son. Maybe not all vampires are killers. Maybe it's safe to let one in.

Only one thing is certain: Even the wall is not enough. A war is coming and we cannot hide forever.

Review

Darkness Before Dawn.

Haha, the title is a pun on the heroine's name! How not cute.

The book started off with an ice-monster prologue that did relatively nothing to entice me and made me realize that the next 350 pages were going to beloooooooooooooong.

Let's start off with our main character, conveniently named Dawn. Dawn is the second-most boring female protagonist I've ever read, only behind Lucinda Price. The best internal line she had in the book was "He was a damn vampire!"

Seriously.

That's it.

Her whole life was so boring. "I did this. I did that. I did this, too. Then, I did that." That was what the prose felt like. It wasn't even prose; it was just crap.

I feel like "J.A. London" (a.k.a. Jan and Alex "London" [a.k.a. Rachel Hawthorne and Alex Nowasky {a.k.a. Jan Nowasky and Alex Nowasky, mother-and-son writing team}]) just wanted to earn a few extra bucks and decided to capitalize off the perpetually-growing YA field. (I'm glad the mom and son didn't decide to write Harlequin romances; that would be justawkward to write together.) I feel ultimately like they could've put a bit more effort into making an original story with refreshingly genuine characters and just plain originality, because what they gave us is a pile of more of the same.

The extra star is for the plot finally moving somewhere within the last one-hundred pages.

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Have you read Darkness Before Dawn? If so, what did you think?