Hello all! I’m so stoked to be sharing info about this book with you all, AND to be participating in my second Irish Banana Book Tour. I had the pleasure of receiving a copy of A Drop of Night by Stefan Bachmann for review.
Review:
Title: A Drop of Night
Author: Stefan Bachmann
Publishing: March 15th 2016 by Greenwillow Books
Source: Publisher (and Irish Banana Book Tours)
Format: Bound Copy
Genre: YA; Mystery; Thriller; Horror; Sci-Fy
Seventeen-year-old Anouk has finally caught the break she’s been looking for—she’s been selected out of hundreds of other candidates to fly to France and help with the excavation of a vast, underground palace buried a hundred feet below the suburbs of Paris. Built in the 1780’s to hide an aristocratic family and a mad duke during the French Revolution, the palace has lain hidden and forgotten ever since. Anouk, along with several other gifted teenagers, will be the first to set foot in it in over two centuries.
Or so she thought.
But nothing is as it seems, and the teens soon find themselves embroiled in a game far more sinister, and dangerous, than they could possibly have imagined. An evil spanning centuries is waiting for them in the depths. . .
Thoughts:
Although I had not heard of A Drop of Night before I got an email about the blog tour, once I read the blurb I immediately added it to my TBR. The premise is just so enticing, you know? I’m a big fan of mister/thrillers, and even though this one ended up being a little bit out of the ordinary, I think it fits well in the advancement of the YA genre.
Let me first start off and say, I walked into A Drop of Night expecting a rather neat thriller mystery. And not to say that I didn’t get those things, but it certainly was that AND a lot more. Within the first few chapters I realized that we would flip back and forth between two first person narrators (Anouk and Aurélie), and that one was our protagonist and the other from the past. This created an interesting dynamic of two starkly different stories that (obivously) would intertwine further along in the plot.
As we moved in the plot, however, everything went from weird, to WAY weird. And at first, it sort of bugged me because it felt unrealistic, but eventually I realized that A Drop of Night is just the sort of book that you really have to go with, in order to enjoy the story. And I really did enjoy the story. The majority of the novel is intense action scenes, so if that isn’t your thing, this book isn’t for you. I thought that this style worked well for this particular story, but it didn’t come without it’s downsides. Anouk, for example, has about zero character development. This is understandable, however, because there isn’t really time for it. Our secondary characters, of course, each had even less development, and had paragraph long backstories that were inserted in the cliché “tell me your past” way.
This being said, I was really satisfied with the way that A Drop of Night ended. So much of the novel is incredibly confusing but I was rather satisfied with the wrap up/explanation (especially upon realization of clues from earlier in the novel). So even though A Drop of Night wasn’t exactly what I expected, it still turned out interesting. There is an Epilogue at the end, but it tactfully left not all questions answered and did not explain too far into the “after future” to protect the readers imatigination (which I appreciated).
Final Thoughts:
Because I’m such a character driven reader, A Drop of Night is (sadly) not landing a spot on my favorites shelf. That being said, I thought that it did do a FANTASTIC job with an exciting and gripping plot, which will certainly please many mystery thriller fans out there. The sic-fy bit came as a bit of a surprise, but I really enjoyed its execution, and if you don’t read this book for any other reason read it for that. Fans of The Maze Runner and Lockdown: Escape from Furnace will LOVE A Drop of Night. Even if you’re a little iffy, I recommend reading this book, because if nothing else, I’ve never read anything like it before.
So now you want to buy A Drop of Night?
Amazon | B&N | Indiebound | iBooks | The Book Depository
Or want to win it? Here’s a giveaway:
Three finished copies of A DROP OF NIGHT (US only)
About the Author:
Stefan Bachmann was born in Colorado and spent of most of his childhood in Switzerland, where he’s now a student of music at the Zürich University of Arts.
His debut, gothic-faery-fantasy THE PECULIAR, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2012, and was translated into eight languages. Its companion, THE WHATNOT, was released on September 24th, 2013.
THE CABINET OF CURIOSITIES: 36 TALES BRIEF AND SINISTER, a collection of scary stories he wrote together with authors Emma Trevayne, Claire Legrand and Katherine Catmull, was released May 27th, 2014, from Greenwillow/HarperCollins.
His next book, YA thriller A DROP OF NIGHT, about a group of American teens fighting to survive after they become trapped in an underground Versailles, will be out March 15th, 2016, also from Greenwillow/HarperCollins.
I want to thank Irish Banana Book Tours for organizing this, and also Green Willow for the copy of A Drop of Night.
