There Will Come A Darkness Review (Spoiler Free)

About the Book

The Age of Darkness approaches. Five lives stand in its way. Who will stop it... or unleash it?

For generations, the Seven Prophets guided humanity. Using their visions of the future, they ended wars and united nations―until the day, one hundred years ago, when the Prophets disappeared.

All they left behind was one final, secret prophecy, foretelling an Age of Darkness and the birth of a new Prophet who could be the world’s salvation . . . or the cause of its destruction. As chaos takes hold, five souls are set on a collision course:

A prince exiled from his kingdom. A ruthless killer known as the Pale Hand. A once-faithful leader torn between his duty and his heart. A reckless gambler with the power to find anything or anyone. A dying girl on the verge of giving up.

One of them―or all of them―could break the world. Will they be savior or destroyer?

Both Suzie & Cat wrote spoiler free reviews for this book, so be sure to scroll to read them both!

Suzie's Review

Most books I review will have both a spoiler & non-spoiler section, but I am not doing that with There Will Come a Darkness purely because it is not out until September 3rd, and I don't want to give anything away. I will most likely post a spoilery review after it has been released.

First off: this book was a solid 4.5/5 stars for me. Like... It was GOOD.

There are a lot of POVs (Point of views) in There Will Come a Darkness, and that really worried me when I first started reading because one or more of the POVs usually drag. This, however, was not the case for There Will Come a Darkness. I was fully engaged with each and every character's storyline. I spent the entire book simultaneously never wanting each chapter to end so that I could find out what happened next to that one character and desperately wanting each chapter to end so that I could find out what was going on with the other four storylines. It was a vicious cycle (in the best of ways).

There Will Come a Darkness was also an absolute rollercoaster of revelations and twists. I swear, every time I turned the page there was something new to discover! I will say that I actually called quite a few of them, but that is mostly because when the full prophecy was revealed, I stopped reading & spent a solid 25 minutes going line by line and working out the possible meanings of each thing. So there is that. Had I not been so predictably me (I've never been good at letting surprises be surprises or leaving riddles unsolved), the revelations probably would've been, well, revelations. Moral of the post: don't be me. Enjoy the ride the book is taking you on and don't stop to over analyze everything. Though I wanted known that even with me being me, there were still a few twists that caught me by surprise! There was one that just caught me totally off guard, and two that I suspected, but wasn't sure about until they were happening. It was like I saw a car coming down a street I needed to cross, thinking I had time to get to the other side, and finding out I was wrong as the car slammed into me. I loved it. Those are honestly my favorite kind of plot twists, and I love when authors successfully pull them off!

So essentially: This book is really good & you need to get it ASAP. The only reason I did not give it 5 stars is because I save 5 star ratings for long term loves. If I still love this story when it comes out in September as much as I love it now, it will likely be listed as a 5 star read when I post my spoiler review.

Cat's Review

For me, if I like a book, it's hard for me to rate it lower than a five stars unless I just really loved most of it and there was a glaring issue otherwise, but this one, this is a solid 5 Stars. It's the perfect start to a new series and will be great for fans of Leigh Bardugo's Grishaverse and for lovers of Brandon Sanderson.

There Will Come a Darkness is a tragic tale of humanity with a prophecy in it's hands trying hard to keep it from coming true and in the process, pushing it more quickly towards it's completion. I've always loved this sort of thing in mythology, so to have it written so well in modern day fiction is absolutely incredible. There were none of the usual snags that many books have trouble with when pulling off this trope, which is usually spending time berating the characters for being stupid enough to think they could prevent a prophecy. Katy Rose Pool never berates her characters, she lets them live and breathe and make mistakes even if that means horrific things for the other characters.

This sort of thing, prophecies and humans floundering to prevent them, is a tale as old as time and yet Pool makes it feel brand new, telling a story that has you going "well, maybe this won't..." And then twisting your insides up as what you, an outsider looking in, knew was coming, does indeed happen. The world these characters live in feels so real, what with it being a society on the edge of its doom- the people pretending that it isn't, and things crumbling apart even as they try to cling to the tiny things going right. The love and the loyalty between these characters despite the horrors looming in front of them, it's all so beautifully written and viscerally palpable.

This is a tale that drew me in and told me to sit and watch while it wove itself full of everything I've ever wanted from a fantasy novel. You will love this book, and that's a promise!