Monday, September 2, 2013

Book Review: Black City

TITLE: Black City
Book 1 in the Black City series
AUTHOR: Elizabeth Richards
PUBLISHED: 2012
CATEGORY: YA
GENRE: Fantasy, Romance, Vampires
PREMISE: Natalie and Ash do the unthinkable: they fall in love even though she is human and he is a darkling...
MY REVIEW: Apologies for my absence last week. I had a heavy work schedule again and it cut into reading time a lot so I didn't have any books to review. Good news is though, it looks like my work load is getting back to normal next week so hopefully I won't be neglecting this blog as much.
So Black City was one of those books from last year that I made a note of but didn't really go out of my way to read. Part of it was honestly I wasn't very interested in the idea. Romeo and Juliet stories are a dime a dozen in YA and honestly the summary made it sound pretty cheesy. But people kept giving it good reviews so I thought I'd check it out. I was pleasantly surprised. I won't lie to you: it IS cheesy. But it's sort of well done cheese? To me there are three levels of cheesy in entertainment. There's the bad cheese: stuff that tries so hard that it just misses the mark entirely and comes off as a unintentional parody (aka Twilight). There's the medium cheese: which is stuff that tends to be self aware and makes in jokes but in the end doesn't really care about quality as long as it entertains (aka Mortal Instruments, anything on SyFy). Then there is good cheese: the stuff that uses its cheese to do meta commentary (aka Star Trek). Black City falls somewhere around medium cheese but does have moments where it goes into good cheese. The romance stuff is business as usual but the world building/plot are some pretty entertaining stuff and there are some good character things going on here and I love Richard's writing.
So this one was a pleasant surprise. There is way more going on in this series then the summary (and cover/packaging) would suggest.
WHO SHOULD READ: Immortal Rules fans, vampire fans
MY RATING: Four and a half out of Five surprise reads

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