Book Review: Darklight by Bella Forrest

Goodreads Summary: "Vampires don’t exist. At least, not anymore..."

I celebrated when vampires were declared extinct.

Those beasts had preyed on humanity for millennia, committing senseless, brutal murders. Like the rest of my colleagues at the Occult Bureau, I looked forward to a world where we could all sleep at night—where constant cover-up jobs were no longer required to keep the public calm and unaware.

But the end of vampires wasn’t the end of our problems. It was only the beginning.

Other blood-sucking creatures began to lurk in the night. As soon as I turned twenty-one, I became a ground agent at the Bureau because I wanted—no, needed—to join the fight.

And then Dorian Clave burst into my life—turning everything I thought I knew into quicksand. Vampires like him were killers who devoured humanity’s inner darkness until shadows danced beneath their skin. Yet there was more to him than that.

He showed me that light cannot exist without the dark and that trying to fight this balance would have consequences our human minds couldn’t even comprehend.

Because sometimes darkness needs to exist.

Goodreads Ratings: 3.64 stars with over 7,900 ratings

Genre listing: Fantasy, Paranormal, Romance, Vampires

Goodreads Challenge: 16/60

2020 Reading Challenge: #5 A book that has the word Light in the Title (Find the full challenge here)

Book Review:

I feel like an old person right now. Blogger has moved things around and updated how everything looks and I'm struggling to find the things I need. Anyways, I hope everyone is doing well. I've been fortunate that my husband and I have had to change very little about our lives. The biggest change is just trying to be mindful about going out and limiting it to needed shopping and now I work from home. Which is fine, because I don't have to wear dress clothes or go into an office that might as well be a petri dish. To all of my momma readers- Happy early Mother's day. I hope your loved ones still find a way to show you appreciation. Given that I haven't known what day it is for the past two months, I'm pretty proud of myself for getting gift deliveries scheduled for the Mother-in-law and the Sister-in-law. 

In some exciting news, my first book is getting shipped off to an editor in the next couple of weeks. I am super excited and terrified, but it's been a long time coming. I've been writing this book for around twelve years now. It's a kid's fantasy book and my dad is going to be doing illustrations for it. So stay tuned. Assuming I don't die from my editor crushing my soul, I'll be self-publishing it. 

Alright, so moving on to Darklight. Obviously, this worked well for #5. There were some other choices I could have gone with, but I settled on this one because one of the Amazon reviews was complaining that there wasn't any romance and it was all war strategy. Choosing a book based on a bad review is probably a first for me, but hey it made me curious.  The concept of Darklight by Bella Forrest is pretty interesting. Essentially, there are different planes on Earth. The immortal plane and the mortal late. Instead of Vampires just feeding off whoever, they are supposed to be the balance between the two planes and feed off of only bad people. They do this by sensing their darkness. The vampires end up having to seek refuge on Earth and end up coming into contact with Lyra, a solider in the Occult Bureau, whose team is trying to rid the planet of some vampiristic birds. Sounds kind of silly, but I thought it worked pretty well. 

The characters were a little flat but still managed to be enjoyable. I actually thought the friendship between Lyra and Dorian was pretty cute. Each human character and vampire character did manage to have their own personality. The only real issue I have is fairly minor, and that's that Bryce is portrayed as being Scottish in the beginning, but it kind of gets dropped in the middle of the book only to be picked back up towards the end. It's not really a huge deal and doesn't really take away from the story, it just felt a little inconsistent. 

I think what I liked most about this paranormal novel is that its fast past. It starts on one of Lyra's missions, and it just seems like constant action until it ends. It makes the story move pretty quickly. The book is about 400ish pages, and it felt like it took me no time at all to read. It was actually hard to find a good stopping point at night because it's just so action-packed that I wanted to keep reading. I will say that if action movies aren't really your thing, this probably wouldn't be an ideal read for you. The main character is military personnel and it takes place on a military base. They go on a lot of missions, so there's a lot of battles, and some violence (it's mostly mentioned casually, there isn't much gore at all). The "romance" is pretty understated and mostly just limited to crushes and tension between the involved parties. It's pretty tame, and probably could be considered YA. The main character is 21, but it's pretty clean. I don't really remember any swearing or anything like that. 

Overall, it's a pretty quick and enjoyable read with an interesting premise. I instantly dove into book two when I finished Darklight, but I'll probably put the rest of it on hold to fulfill an author request. It's on Kindle Unlimited, so if you use the service you're not really losing anything to give it a read.