{REVIEW} A Drop of Night by Stefan Bachmann

A DROP OF NIGHT
by Stefan Bachmann

Genre: Young Adult, Horror
Pub Date: Mar 15, 2016
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Length: 439 pages
Spoilers: N/A
Goodreads ♦ Amazon($9.89)

 

---

Seventeen-year-old Anouk has finally caught the break she’s been looking for—she’s been selected out of hundreds of other candidates to fly to France and help with the excavation of a vast, underground palace buried a hundred feet below the suburbs of Paris. Built in the 1780’s to hide an aristocratic family and a mad duke during the French Revolution, the palace has lain hidden and forgotten ever since. Anouk, along with several other gifted teenagers, will be the first to set foot in it in over two centuries.

Or so she thought.

But nothing is as it seems, and the teens soon find themselves embroiled in a game far more sinister, and dangerous, than they could possibly have imagined. An evil spanning centuries is waiting for them in the depths. . .

---

So… Horror
Okay. Either I’m like the worst person to read horror because it takes a LOT to disturb me or scare me or… this book just wasn’t truly horror. It relied more heavily on the mystery and lack of answers aspect than horror. It was like a mind-game was being played with the characters and yet… there were no clues being offered up throughout the course of the book to even give the reader (or the characters) a chance at figuring out the puzzle.

The MC
God. The MC, Anouk. I thought that I could get along with Anouk. I thought we might have something in common (snarky attitude and what not), but no. Anouk is just a raging bitch with literally NO redeeming qualities. She can’t even find it in herself to be civil with other people and I’m anything if not civil with people, even those whom I hate. So, this really irked me because I hated reading from her POV.

Dual-POV in Different Times
Ugh! This bothered me so much! I actually really liked Aurelie and her POV, BUT it was not appropriate for this book. For many reasons, in fact.
1) Her chapters acted as a ‘heads-up’ to the present day chapters, taking away all the potential thrill factor from them. *sigh*
2) Didn’t offer anything to the story that wasn’t already placed within the present day chapters.
3) I would’ve preferred to read the historical sections for the entire book than the present day sections because of the narrators. -.-

Oh the loose ends
One thing that kind of bothered about this story was that it was just like: “here! Answers!” And I was like… um… those don’t add up. Because they didn’t. It gave explanations to what was going on and most of it made sense, but there were a couple aspects that literally just didn’t fit into the way the story was designed. Thus, it left an unclean ending and made it feel as though there were plotholes.

---

---