"The Darkest War," by Isabella Ruiz

Audience: Young Adult

Genre: Fantasy

Overall Content Rating: Clean

Content Warnings

Abuse

Whipping/slashing with knife but was mentioned from the past

Death

Murder

Violence

Multiple occasions of being slapped across the face

Overall Review

I am so excited to really dive into this book review for you guys. This one could potentially be a little awkward to write, seeing as though Isabella is a friend of mine, but I'm hopeful that this will turn out well. My goal is to be true and honest with myself about how I feel that it was written, but also be understanding of the book and its goals. Knowing Isabella, I knew that this book was going to be quite clean, so what I was looking for was primarily craft things, so let's get into it!

Overall, there were a lot of parts of this that seemed really cliche to me, and I want to explain that a bit here. The premise of this story is the Princess of the Night Kingdom (Isadora) is pushed into an arranged marriage (by her father) with the Prince of the Day Kingdom (Drykan; who was pushed into it by his mother). While neither prince nor princess were pleased by this, Isadora has more of an issue with it because she's in love with someone else. The question is: Is there a way to escape? Will her title save her, or will it only doom her in the end?

One thing that I noticed is that the premise itself influenced a lot of the story, and since part of it was cliche, it ended up impacting a lot of what happened in the story. I know I personally have read a lot of stories about two kingdoms coming together by way of an arranged marriage and that in itself has turned into a cliche for me depending on how they're brought forth. In the case of this book, it reminded me of a bunch of different mildly trite tropes and almost made me think that they were smashed together to create a story. Which isn't bad in it of itself, but it can often leave the reader feeling like they've read this before. The love triangle was perhaps the most overused part, but the abusive father aspect was also not entirely handled as I would've liked.

However, the push-pull between characters was okay. All throughout the story, we see Princess Isadora and Prince Drykan really interacting in positive and negative ways. It's interesting to see and question how much Drykan truly cares for Isadora, especially since she was so cruel to him in the beginning. From the first few chapters, we can tell that he likes her, if not loves her, at least as a friend. But after that, it gets complicated with the addition of Lucien, the love interest. It adds a love triangle, which personally I'm not a fan of, but it makes it really hard to connect with Isadora because we aren't really allowed to see inside of her head and see her motivations behind loving them both as much as I would've liked.

The characters themselves were fairly flat, which disappointed me a bit. There are a few moments in the story where they almost spring off the page and shine, but then there are others where it's positively dull. That said, we had a full array of characters. There were characters to love, characters to hate, characters to feel bad for, characters that maybe got more than they deserved in the end... there are so many that I could talk about and I don't have space for them all, but some of them are on their way to becoming incredible characters (my fave was Acacia, for those of you who are interested in reading this/have read this). Overall, I just couldn't connect and couldn't understand the motivations of each character. There were a lot of moments where it felt like they were responding out of proportion with the actual action (Isadora was the most guilty of this), and that made it really hard to enjoy and be understanding of them.

Moving off of the character topic, I want to talk about the sensory details a bit. I would've loved to truly experience the subtle changes between kingdoms more, other than the clear attention to color and light brightness differences. A scene where we felt immersed in the sensory field of what was happening would've been incredible and I know Isabella is capable of it.

I will say that this book was written from a Christian point of view, so there are multiple mentions of God and a few instances of prayer and mentioning their favorite books of the Bible. I'm not sure it was really focused on as much as it could've been and it wasn't incorporated into the characters' lives in the way that they were living it, so it seemed very surface-level, but that's just my view of it. I'd love to know if someone else thinks otherwise!

Ultimately, I wasn't a huge fan of this book, as much as I wanted to be, but my faith in Isabella as an author isn't lost by any means. She had some great elements in this book and it's still fully capable of being enjoyed, as long as you're not as nitpicky as I was. This book is totally clean, so I did enjoy that aspect, but there's a lot to be desired with this one. But that said, it was pretty good! Hope this helps!

(P.S. If you read this book, please keep in mind that it's not a standalone. I read it thinking it was and was muffled screaming at the end, so... there you go)