Book Series Review: The Nevernight Chronicle

I recently finished the third and final book in the Nevernight Chronicle, Darkdawn by Jay Kristoff. It is a grim dark fantasy series, with the first book Nevernight that came out in 2016. It is not the first trilogy by Jay Kristoff as he has written two before; the Lotus War series and the Illuminae Files. I have not read either of them, so this was my first time reading from this author. I will try and keep this as spoiler free as possible. Overall, as grim dark fantasy series go, which is one of my favoured settings with my favourite authors being Andrzej Sapkowski, Joe Abercrombie, Luke Scull and Scott Lynch. The Nevernight chronicle certainly reaches some of those levels. The trilogy centres around the character Mia Corvere who joins this church of assassins. Mia is certainly what makes the trilogy, as her character and backstory is really well developed. There is a cast of other characters with others that stand out such as Mister Kindly. (He’s anything but kind really). The writing style and world building is incredible, and clearly has been inspired by the Roman Republic. The main government is a republic but there’s a lot of Italian and roman sounding names and phrases but that’s what makes it really interesting and a bit of a departure from the usual medieval England inspired fantasy. For instance the colour purple just like the real world romans, is a colour of prestige since the time of the Itreya’s last King, Francisco XV and its small details that even though have no real impact on the story just makes the world more three dimensional. Here is where it differs from most books in the same genre as there are footnotes at the bottom every few pages with added descriptions that really build upon the world building, so the example I gave above about the colour purple was a footnote detail. I personally found it fascinating but I’m aware that some people would find it distracting and may people pull out of immersion as some of them across both pages. With that in mind the story is well written throughout the three books, there are some moments and scenes I did not personally enjoy so I skipped them, particularly in the second book. The final book rounding things off, and the story ended well with it being a trilogy rather than a long-complicated series. The books are not too long either. They are worth reading at least once if you’re looking to get into the genre. A solid 6 out of 10.