The Dark Days Club by Alison GoodmanSeries: Lady Helen #1
Genre: Paranormal
Release Date: 26th January 2016
Publisher: Walker Books
Source: Publisher
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Rating:
London, April 1812. On the eve of eighteen-year-old Lady Helen Wrexhall’s presentation to the queen, one of her family’s housemaids disappears-and Helen is drawn into the shadows of Regency London. There, she meets Lord Carlston, one of the few who can stop the perpetrators: a cabal of demons infiltrating every level of society. Dare she ask for his help, when his reputation is almost as black as his lingering eyes? And will her intelligence and headstrong curiosity wind up leading them into a death trap?
I was so ready to dive into The Dark Days Club and absolutely adore it. Eon has to be one of the earliest hyped fantasy books in the YA community, and I have had it sitting on my shelf unread for years. Everyone loves it, and everyone has recommended it to me. So you can imagine how excited I was to have a month of reading everything by Alison Goodman, right?
Well, whatever excitement I was feeling was killed after about fifty pages of The Dark Days Club. I tried, I really did. I tried so hard. But the book was too slow for my liking, and I just couldn’t get into it quick enough to love it. Things were great in the beginning, but just before the whole paranormal world is revealed to Lady Helen things just got really, really slow.
Then there was a huge info-dump after Helen discovered this secret club. Information was (almost) literally thrown at me over and over again, and the characters kept explaining all of this stuff about demons that really should have been shown to me instead.
As for the characters, I liked Helen. She was all right. But she’s the only one I felt even the slightest connection with, which is to say she is the only one who is fleshed out enough to read about. I was probably meant to like Carlston as well, and there were moments where I did, but overall he was very dull and failed to catch my interest.
The Dark Days Club reminds me a lot of The Diviners, in the sense that it was slow, the world building was in the background, and there wasn’t a decent ship. I still want to read Eon though, because DRAGONS.
I had not heard of Alison Goodman at all before reading this book. I completely missed hearing anything about Eon but I was actually convinced to read after reading this. I agree, the book was slow to start and there was a lot of world building. I suppose there was more telling than showing, but I can see why. Helen has to sneak out and can never not have time which isn’t properly accounted for and always needs a chaperone, how is she supposed to be able to fully immerse herself in this new world when she can’t tell anyone about it? I’m hoping there’ll be a lot more action in the next book, I do think this one was setting up for the action in the next one.
I don’t know. I can see the flaws, especially as it’s been a couple of weeks since I finished it, but for me it was still a really good book. I gave it 5 stars for a reason. It may be because I can see the potential in it rather than for the book itself, but I still really enjoyed it. I liked the character of Helen and I was intrigued by Carlston. I only wish you learnt more in this book, I still have so many questions.