Rane Aria

  When it comes to personal reader's hype it's hard to deal with alot of emotions from jubilation to disappointment. A Darkness Strange and Lovely by Susan Dennard made me run through alot of emotions. Not all good and not all bad.
The writing of course of superb that I quickly zoomed through this book. Sadly, this felt like a meal that left me hungry.
Picking up months later, Eleanor has to run when Marcus the necromancer one of the foes whose started the chaos from before,starts to hunt her. Along the way to meet up with the Spirit Hunters in Pairs, she meets a demon that was attached to her brother- but Oliver is hiding something but she's forced to trust him when he helps her save.
Now in Paris things aren't looking up and chaos is just steps away from destroying the city.

I had high hopes for this book and while it showed Eleanor dealing with new things and her new powers. I understood her changes. It just lacked heart of the characters. That was what made book 1 and the novelle. This also made the world building or lack there of an okay thing because the characters carried everything.

You're introduced to new characters and while Ollie was an okay addition I wanted Joseph, Jie, and of course Daniel and have the team back together. This didn't truly happen. Everyone was thrown into different paths and later just left out, that they felt like small side characters with anger and trust issues and this story struggled without them.
I would have loved that everyone helped Eleanor deal and figure out her new powers as they deal with this new threats. Eleanor is stuck hiding from everyone and running around with characters who I didn't feel were needed or would make an impact to the story.

Eleanor was the one I was most disappointed in as she wasn't the heroine who I loved in book 1 but someone changed into someone I didn't know, hiding truths and she became flat.

Still the mystery and the bits of world building were what truly saved this book and while I haven't given up on this series by a long shot. I think book 3 has alot of making up for.