*Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this book for review, all opinions are my own*

4.5 stars

I loved this book it has everything romance, magic, mystery, war, royalty, and a great plot twist.
This book has two main focuses - romance and mystery.
I loved the romance, it was my favorite part of this book, we have a very well-made enemy to lovers that captivate you and make you fall in love together with the characters.
The mystery is not that good, I discovered when I was in the middle towards the end of the book but even so the author still brought some plot twist that you might not expect, I thought the ending was a bit stretched, it seemed that the protagonist would never be able to solve the things and whenever I thought it was going to be all right, something else happened that shocked me.
I really liked this book, it was fast and pleasant to read, it changes a lot as you read (talking about the atmosphere of the book) but I think that's what makes it so interesting, you know where the story goes but at the same time that goes where you knew it brings new things.
I liked the book so much, and it made me happy while reading, I recommend it a lot if you like romance and mystery.

First I would like to thank NetGalley, Allison Saft and Wednesday Books for allowing me access to an ARC of this book. I will be honest, I did not expect to fall so hard for this book. I love it so much I have already ordered a physical copy of it for my library.

Wren is born a disgrace to her royal family and her aunt, now Queen, has dismissed her from her position in the royal guard. This not only means she lost her freedom, but an end to investigating what happened to her missing friend and being separated from her lover. When Wren is offered a job to use her magic and skill to find a cure to a plague that is killing a well-known wealthy family in the neighboring county, she sees this as her only chance to prove her worth. Against her Queen’s orders, she accepts the job. She is soon thrust into a world of more chaos, betrayal, murder, and mystery than she bargained for. She is a tight deadline to find out what is killing the servants of Colwick Hall and more importantly, who is doing it. Whom ever is behind this illness is hopefully the connecting key to finding her missing friend and could possibly stop the war that is brewing in her own country if she could prove it.

This gothic tale is officially my favorite read of 2021. You know when a book is so good that you don’t even have words to describe how amazing it is? That is currently me, I have no words. It is THAT GOOD. I stayed up until 3am because I simply could not put this down. It has everything I love – Magic, war, love triangles, one bed trope, enemies to lovers, gothic castles, murder mystery and a strong female lead that finds her true self after she has hit complete bottom.

The author said she is not coming out with a sequel, but I honestly think this could be a trilogy or more and be one of the best series out there. I haven’t read this good of a book in such a long time and I truly hope she reconsiders because this book is EVERYTHING! If you put one book on your TBR, make it this one!!!

Down Comes the Night is the debut novel from Allison Saft, and it was the perfect book for the gothic, YA fantasy, enemies-to-lovers vibe I was feeling.

The plot was interesting, overall. Even though I was able to predict the main important plot point waaaay before Wren or Hal, and as a result, the middle seemed to drag for me (though some of it is quite possibly a result of personal stress that equated into lack of focus for reading...). The one thing I didn't like, however, was that I was hoping for more of a gothic vibe -- Wren's initial time at Colwick Hall was creepy, but over time, it started to feel a little superficial.

Generally, I liked the characters. I liked Wren well enough, even if her character came off a little flat sometimes. It was also cool to have a bisexual MC as well as a lesbian side character (representation is so important). I liked Wren's friendship with Una; it was complex and raw and frought with tension (spoiler: but they were able to resolve their issues...eventually). Hal was also a complex character who I adored. He had this tough outer layer, but once Wren pulled back his thorny exterior, he ended up being sweet and kind and so much more. Queen Isabel and Lord Alistair Lowry were a little harder to swallow, but that was the point of their characters -- and they were well written as well.

I thought the author's writing style was good, if a bit flowery. There were some instances where I felt like the author either repeated herself (to point out emphasis for a particular plot point) or just described something too much.

I will say that, even though there seem to be a few things that I didn't like, there was much more that I really enjoyed in this book, and it was exactly what I needed to get me out of my slight reading slump. I will definitely be looking forward to the next books by Allison Saft!

3.5 stars, rounded up.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for a copy of this eARC in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts are my own.

I wasn't sure what to expect. Gothic mystery? Fantasy? Magic? Mystery? It was some of all but not completely any of them. It sometimes seemed to switch between chapters so that I never felt really settled and comfortable. That isn't a bad thing, but in the end I thought this was a good book and not something I was invested in or cared too much about.

Down Comes the Night is the fulfilment of all my dreams. Well, not quite literally, but who wouldn't want to read a fantasy enemies-to-lovers romance with a strong lead, diverse rep and kind of a bad boy and with all of these amazing tropes done WELL?! (There was a "only-one-bed" situation as well. Yes, I am melting.)

Let me just say, I'm seriously contemplating buying this book and I literally only buy copies of my absolute favourites. This isn't that, but it IS very good.

I am quite impressed with Allison Saft! Despite the type of book it is (YA gothic fantasy), nothing is "out-there" about Down Comes the Night:
- the magic? Believable
- the love story? Soooo believable
- the story line? Believable
- the bad guy? Exquisitely well crafted and far from the usual stereotypical characters traits and behavior

Saft has accomplished a feat at making her debut novel flow so naturally.

All characters all multi-faceted, surprising, attractive, some much more evil than others. Yet, not a single character was aggravating me due to stereotypical character development like it often happens when reading new stories. The story is rich, not dragging, and... the love story.. oh my! I am in love with the love between Wren and XX (not saying the name to avoid spoiler).

Please pick up this book if you like the genre. You will not be disappointed!

Thank you Net Galley and Wednesday Books for this e-ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

4.25 Stars

I loved this dark gothic romantic fantasy! Who knew this combination would work so well together.

Wren is a magical healer that has been removed from her military position. So when she gets a letter from a neighboring lord to heal his employee, she takes that opportunity. Once she gets there and sees her patient, she recognizes him as her enemy. She decides to help figure out what is wrong with Hal, but finds a very interesting diagnosis. In the meantime, Lord Lowry starts to act very suspicious. She now has to decide who's side she is on.

The beginning of the book to a bit of time to get interesting, but once it took off, I didn't want to put the book down. I enjoyed the plotline, the characters, the writing, the fantasy aspects, the setting, the murder mystery, and the romance. So it looks like I liked all aspects of the book.

I will definitely be reading her next book.

Thanks Netgalley and publisher for the digital copy in exchange for my honest review!

What a great debut! I loved Wren and Hal so much, they had so much chemistry and I really loved their banter and their buildup from dislike to reluctant partners to friends to lovers! the mystery plot was really intriguing and the characters (main and side) were really great! I loved the powers and world building, i specially loved the idea behind Wren’s healing powers so much and really enjoyed her journey! I wish this wasn’t a standalone because the characters were so great and so was the world, and I would love to read more about it! Super recommend this if you’re looking for a quick and fun fantasy standalone to read with a great romance and plot.

This novel is perfect for fans of "Mexican Gothic" and the 'Poison Study" series. I love that its dark royalty mystery meets dark academia vibes. The writing is so melodic and beautiful! I adored Wren and Hal's slow-burn romance and their witty banter - perfect example of the enemies to lovers trope! Wren is such an unusual heroine, not only because she breaks all the stereotypes of a bisexual female character, but because her character arc is so complex. I love that she isn't afraid to cry and that even in a novel full of magic, Wren possesses such relatable personality traits. I could see this novel working well as a standalone book, but there is plenty of worldbuilding the author could do in the future.

I had so many high hopes for Down Comes The Night, and it never disappointed. This is an incredible gothic romance, which is all at once eerie, romantic, and incredibly enthralling

War had made orphans of them all.

Down Comes the Night is a standalone story marketed as young adult, fantasy, romance, and Gothic. I don't often venture into young adult but I was surprised when there was a sex scene in the last ten percent of the story, but maybe this isn't unheard of. The characters are around nineteen which, with the overall tone, made me think this fit more in New Adult, just less sex than I'm used to seeing in that sub-genre. With our characters having magic abilities, Wren, who is our main protagonist, can heal and Hal, the enemy-to-lover, can kill with his eyes, the fantasy element was there. The world building gives us three countries, Danu, Vesria, and Cenos, with Danu and Vesria currently in a truce after warring for centuries. This is why the military ranks are full of young adults, as there has been mass casualties on both sides. The war seems to be about religious differences and power struggle between the magic empires. Cenos has remained neutral as their citizens don't have magic abilities.

“It’s uncomfortable, yes, to be so aware of you.” Good, she wanted to say.
Suffer with me.

The story is told from Wren's point of view and she is the illegitimate daughter of the queen of Danu's sister. With her mother and father both dead, Wren is sent to a holy cloister until she is twelve years old and then sent to the military academy to train in the medical corps as her magic heals. There she meets Una, and with a little hero worship in their relationship from Wren, they become friends and eventually have one night together before Una declares it can never happen again because she is Wren's superordinate in the military. When three soldiers of Danu who were patrolling the border between Danu and Vesria go missing, one who happens to be Wren's friend, the queen sends Una and Wren to investigate. Wren's sense of mercy allows a lead to escape and she ends up getting punished by the queen and sent back to the holy cloisters, feeling let down by Una. There she receives a letter from Lord Alistair Lowry III, a noble in Cenos, asking her to come help cure a servant and use her status as an almost royal to work as a liaison between their countries as he wants Cenos to side with Danu and defeat Versia. Wren, wanting to finally prove her worth, goes against the queen and Una and leaves to help the servant.

Something was undeniably rotten in Colwick Hall.

Wren arrives in Cenos, around the twenty percent mark, is where the Gothic tone creeps in more as Lowry lives in a dark and forbidding castle that is rumored to be haunted. It started off with Gothic promise but I'm not sure it was fully sustained but if this is written for young adult minds, then the howling and mystery of the closed off East wing could hit the mark for them. When Wren goes to heal the servant, she discovers that the servant is in fact Hal Cavendish, The Reaper of Vesria, a soldier that has killed thousands of her country brethren and supposedly in line to become the ruler of Vesria. While at Colwick Hall, Wren discovers that Hal's sickness and Lowry are not all they seem and she finds herself growing to care for Hal as she battles the desire to deliver Hal to the queen and become a hero in the queen and her country's eyes.

But it would never be simple. He was Vesrian, and she was Danubian.

I thought around the fifty percent mark, when Wren finally begins to trust Hal as he says that he is also investigating disappearances but of Vesria soldiers, that the pace started to slow down. The newness of the world ebbed and I started to look for more depth behind certain elements, the queen's obsession of clocks, the queen herself, the war, Severance (taking away someone's magic), and world itself. Wren trying to figure out what exactly is going with Lowry had her going in circles for too long and then Wren and Hal running from the castle felt needless and pointless to the overall plot. At first, the story felt set in some kind of fantasy medieval time but when it moves to Cenos, it switches to Victorian, which with Cenos supposed to be more technologically advanced, I guess could make sense but really it just made the fantasy and Gothic elements not mesh right and neither ended up feeling developed fully.

I believe you, he’d said, with more trust and affection than she thought she’d ever deserve. Now she had to believe in herself.

The author's messaging was clear, endless wars cause horrible suffering, the lies from leaders at the top usually have self-serving purposes, and mercy and caring are not weaknesses. Wren and Hal getting to know one another and dispelling rumors and lies about each other, clearly built up their friendship. Their attraction had sweet moments that I thought fit into young adult but their physicality sometimes leaned into New Adult for me. The messaging was good but I thought it got lost in some slow pacing that could have been trimmed up. As fantasy novels usually come in trilogies though, Down Comes the Night does deliver a good story in a one-stop.

Saft's world building is done pretty well but much is left for the reader to surmise from the bits and pieces mentioned by the characters. The main characters are likeable or easy to hate depending on their roles within the story. The growing love story between two characters that should have been mortal enemies is the redeeming factor to this book that often gets lost in its own desire to twist and turn the plot hoping to confuse readers, as a good gothic novel should.
This is a slow read filled with gothic elements and a plot that is engaging, but the end seemed to wrap up just too quickly.
I would recommend this to a variety of readers and encourage them to stick it out if it seems difficult to get through the beginning.

Thank you NetGalley and publisher for the dARC of this work in exchange for my honest review.

I really like #downcomesthenight for its inventive use of magic as an instrument of war and as a healing art as well as a conduit for love, redemption and justice. Wren and Hal or an unlikely pair but they become a symbol for changing the future of their world. A big thank you to #netgalley and #wednesdaybooks for this ebook to read and review. I hope Ms Saft writes more about Wren and Hal.

This is another fantasy book that fits many genre. A little gothic, magic, romance, war.....pretty much an entire library of sub genre rolled into one very good book. Allison Saft took the time....and definitely has the talent....to build two kingdoms on the verge of battle and a somewhat eerie mix of gloom and doom castle and kingdom in between the two. The characters display such fierce loyalty to their own worlds that they end up working together when both are threatened. The suspense builds as the characters are forced to travel into unknown dangers while keeping their paths back to their homes clear. Ms Saft has definitely written a story that I really couldn't put down for fear I'd miss something. Just an absolutely fantastic read.

Down Comes the Night totally surprised me! I was expecting YA fantasy and instead I got YA fantasy/murder mystery. At first, I really wasn’t sure of Down Comes the Night. Then Wren ran away to the gothic manor haunted by a mysterious illness (~25% of the way into the book). And I was hooked.

I also really didn’t expect the direction the story took, which was a nice surprise. I also really liked Hal and his relationship with Wren. However, I always found myself wanting more from the story - more details on the magic system, on the world, and the characters backstories. So while I loved this as a gothic murder mystery, I felt slightly dissatisfied overall. But I still really enjoyed the book, mostly because the atmosphere was so fantastic.

Down Comes the Night was a quick and interesting read! If you’re looking for a gothic YA fantasy, look no further.

Meh, I thought I would like this book more than I did. But the enemy to lover cliche made me just not like it. Wren is an illegitimate relative of the Queen, and tries to find a place for herself within the military as a healer (she has strong healing magic) and the approval of the Queen. But when her soft heart leads to a big mistake, she is thrown out of the military. When a letter from a lord from a neighboring country asks her to come to his castle to heal someone, she jumps at the chance. But what she finds in the castle is far more nefarious than she expects. She ends up having to try and heal her country's biggest enemy. They go round and round and then realize that the enemy isn't each other, it is someone else, and they might be closer than they realize. (dun dun dun). I think for me, this book tried to do too much. murder mystery, gothic setting, magic, war. All the things. And it just felt forced together and didn't flow well.

Wren loses her position in the Danubian military after a prisoner she healed breaks free. In an attempt to be reinstated, she flees to nearby Cernos to try and broker an alliance to help stop the Danubian/Vesrian war. What she discovers when she is there changes her worldview...and could destroy everything.

This book was good...another one that I wish I could give 3.5 stars to. It did feel like the book stretched on for forever, partially because nothing really happened for the first half of the book.

The magic aspect of the book wasn’t explored very much, not as much as I would expect a fantasy to explore. I thought the idea to contrast it with science and electricity was interesting, as was pairing medical science with healing magic.

The romance in the book was low-key enough that it didn’t bother me (I feel like so many books that are not romance books focus too much on romance). It didn’t feel forced or just randomly thrown in. It was a slower development, which was nice. The male romantic interest, however, was not very interesting. It was good that he was not as evil as everyone thought, but his development pretty much ended there.

Thank you so much to NetGalley, St. Martin’s Press, and Wednesday Books for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. Sorry the review is so late.

A gothic setting, enemies to lovers romance, an intriguing mystery, and some fantasy thrown in-you have just described the perfect outline for a book! Luckily, Down Comes the Night has all of that and more! I will be looking forward to rereading this again in the fall when the mood is just right. The only downfall was that I felt like some parts were a bit too obvious/predictable. But not enough where it took away my enjoyment of the book. I'm looking forward to whatever Allison Saft writes next!

READ THIS OR ELSE. WREN AND HAL FOR LIFE. GET HAL A BOWL OF SOUP AND SIT HIM BY THE FIRE AND LET HIM BE NO ONE TOUCH, NO ONE BE MEAN, WE PROTECC, WE ATTACC, CUZ HAL IS A SNACC. THANK YOU FOR COMING TO MY TED TALK.

This review can also be found on my blog, Where the Words Take Me.

Thank you, to NetGalley and the publisher, for offering this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Down Comes the Night is Allison Saft’s debut novel, an original YA fantasy that pits logic and ruthlessness against emotion and forgiveness—and explores where the line is drawn between the two. What choices render you into your best self? Following the duty you’ve pledged yourself to or following your instincts to do what is right?

These are choices that Wren Southerland wrestles with daily in the country of Danu. A solider with healing magic in the Queen’s Guard, she is torn by the empathy she feels even toward enemy soldiers. Not even her best friend and commanding officer, Una Dryden, can save Wren once she makes a reckless mistake healing a captured enemy. Dismissed from the guard, Wren is determined to get back into the Queen’s good graces and return to the side of the girl she loves, even if Una can never truly reciprocate her affections. Wren sees her chance for redemption when an invitation arrives from a lord in a neutral country promising to lend his support to the Queen in exchange for curing his favorite servant from a mysterious illness plaguing his estate. However, Colwick Hall holds more mysteries than a disease that can kill, including that Wren’s patient isn’t a servant at all but Hal Cavendish, the Reaper of Vesria and Danu’s public enemy number one. As the estate and its eccentric host, Lord Lowry, turn more ominous, Wren and Hal will have to work together to solve the sinister forces at work even at the risk of committing treason, if their feelings for each other don’t render them traitors first.

The first third of Down Comes the Night was so intriguing. I adored Wren and how much she struggled with her emotions, always feeling too much but being forced to express so little for fear of various repercussions. As someone who tends to smother my own emotions unless I’m around certain people, her struggles resonated with me. The writing struck a beautiful balance of Wren experiencing her emotions, having reckless ideas because of them, and then showing how she actually reacts in a more logical outcome once she’s worked through them. Her resentment towards Queen Isabel, her aunt, conflicted tragically with her desperation to be loved and accepted by her. It’s that good familial drama that I never get enough of. I also loved how Wren’s bisexuality was handled, how doomed her romantic feelings for Una were yet how deeply she yearned for her anyway—and how willing she was to set everything aside if it meant remaining best friends until she couldn’t anymore.

Una herself cut a striking figure, the severe logos to Wren’s bleeding pathos. While I do feel that Una’s lesbianism could’ve been shown in deeper ways outside of Wren, I still appreciated how much Una wavered for no one else except Wren. I believed in their friendship, in the complicated good parts and the messy bad parts of it. How Una did love Wren but also wanted her to fit inside a box she wasn’t suited for. I believed in Una’s dedication to uphold duty and honor and how that conflicted with Wren’s nature, how badly Wren wanted to change for her but ultimately knew deep down she never could. Then there’s the delicious bit that Isabel prefers Una and is proud of her in all the ways that Wren craves the same acknowledgement.

Aside from these intricate interpersonal relationships, Saft also writes beautiful, atmospheric settings and descriptions. I could see Danu’s filthy streets, feel the winter’s cold winds and stirred-up snowdrifts, and shudder at the dilapidated darkness of Colwick Hall. I could always envision the characters’ surroundings and what they were doing, wearing, and interacting with. At no point did a scene ever feel static. Saft also managed to convey in Wren grief for a character you as a reader never meet, poignantly demonstrating how deeply feelings for a loved run can run and how suddenly grief can sneak up on you as the little things in life remind you of them. Normally, I wouldn’t care about this kind of character, but Saft ensured I did because his effect on Wren truly mattered as part of her own character.

I especially appreciated all the usage of medical language and scientific descriptions for Wren’s healing powers. The writing never glossed over the details if she was setting a bone or listening to someone’s lungs, and the actual process of healing was never waved away as just being “because magic.” The magic system was intimately tied to medical science and anatomy, and I loved that.

Yet despite all these praises, I only awarded Down Comes the Night three stars when at the start I was so certain it’d be an easy, instant favorite. That’s because when I reached about halfway through, I realized I was bored and the story had lost its steam. Sadly, it’s because of how Hal was written along with his romance with Wren, which I had deeply wanted to root for. In short, he and the romance were boring.

Theirs was an enemies-to-lovers romance in name only. Despite Hal being dubbed the Reaper of Vesria, known for his magical ability to kill someone using eye contact alone, he is already deeply repentant of being a war criminal and wants to do better when Wren meets him. Besides the understandable suspicions of two enemy soldiers meeting officially for the first time, Wren and Hal don’t do anything horrible to each other or were all that combative at all besides the initial biting meeting. In fact, any viciousness or betrayal comes solely from Wren’s side, and it is quickly resolved and forgotten about once it truly sinks into her how secretly good and sad and funny Hal has been the entire time.

That’s not enemies-to-lovers, folks. This could’ve been so much better, so much more interesting, if Hal also needed to grow beyond learning how to be vulnerable to one person. He could’ve done that while also being a terrible patient and largely unrepentant of his crimes, a real bastard that Wren could challenge at every point. And she would’ve done so. My girl is strong and reckless enough to do it.

In the end, Hal was just a beautiful, sad, stoic nineteen-year-old boy whose own horrific power didn’t work for the majority of the book. I kept waiting on him to pose any kind of threat or actually do something besides being sick and frail and withdrawn in bed. Rather than read any real conflict between him and Wren, I had to sit through conversations of these two nitwits realizing the propaganda their countries fed them about each other was mostly lies, like come on. Y’all are smarter than this and definitely should’ve been more exciting. The real villain of the story, meanwhile, was so transparent from the start that I got no excitement there, either.

In fact, the book struggles often with its transparency. It’s always painfully clear where the story is going, so it ultimately defeats any sense of mystery it tries to build. From the romance to character motivations to plot, depth is tragically missing. There’s also a character named Hannah who is completely forgotten about once the mystery concludes and Wren permanently leaves Colwick Hall, and part of me still can’t believe she was just dropped like that.

The book also isn’t gothic enough to be called a gothic romance; Colwick Hall as a setting was not enough by itself. Furthermore, its tagline “Love makes monsters of us all”—which is extremely gothic horror/romance—couldn’t be further from what the book gives you. At no point were Hal and Wren pushed towards true monstrosity for loving each other, not even in the finale. Instead, it was all quite, dare I say, lukewarm and business-as-usual. I’d be much more prone to assigning that tagline to Wren and Una since they had actual conflict and hurt feelings to overcome.

For the majority of the book, I loved Wren anyway—I cannot stress that enough—but I rolled my eyes at Wren taking on a “If I kill this terrible villain, then I’m just as bad as them! Mercy is the harder choice!” stance when it was absolutely justifiable and in self-defense. And I’m a lover of nasty villains if written well, by the way. This is also where the book’s angle on forgiveness falls very flat. “I’m not going to ever forgive you for what you’ve done,” Wren tells the villain, but she also decides she’s not going to stop them from performing more blatant, unrepentant evil they are hellbent on doing because killing them would just be enjoyable vengeance instead of, y’know, life-saving. At some point, the cycle of violence has to stop, so it’ll stop with her making the choice to not kill them… but she’s not going to forgive them. And she’s going to let them get away. Wren, you do have to pick one here, I’m afraid. I’m so tired of authors not letting their (mostly female) characters commit a murder like doing so is somehow going to taint them beyond repair or completely invalidate them as a kind-hearted person. This moment completely took me out of the book and affected my rating because of it.

But most of all, I can’t get over the fact that Saft dedicated the book to Masashi Kishimoto, the creator of Naruto, in her acknowledgments, which isn’t a big deal. I love me some Naruto. Reading this, however, caused my brain to unlock the realization that what I’d just finished reading with Wren and Hal was a dull Sakura/Itachi fanfic. (Not that this book was bad; it’s its own thing. Hal is just the most boring version of Itachi Uchiha I’ve ever read, the fola was chakra, Isabel was Tsunade, Una was Inu, and now that I see all these things, I cannot unsee them. Believe it!)

Even so, Saft certainly has a lyrical yet meaningful way with words overall. As a debut, Down Comes the Night has its ups and downs, but I’m deeply interested to see what Saft will produce in the future and hope her talent keeps shining through as she hones her craft. She’s definitely an author I will watch for from now on.