Defy the Night Review

A fantasy series about a kingdom divided by corruption, the prince desperately holding it together, and the girl who will risk everything to bring it crashing down.

The kingdom of Kandala is on the brink of disaster. Rifts between sectors have only worsened since a sickness began ravaging the land, and within the Royal Palace, the king holds a tenuous peace with a ruthless hand.

King Harristan was thrust into power after his parents' shocking assassination, leaving the younger Prince Corrick to take on the brutal role of the King's Justice. The brothers have learned to react mercilessly to any sign of rebellion--it's the only way to maintain order when the sickness can strike anywhere, and the only known cure, an elixir made from delicate Moonflower petals, is severely limited.

Out in the Wilds, apothecary apprentice Tessa Cade is tired of seeing her neighbors die, their suffering ignored by the unyielding royals. Every night, she and her best friend Wes risk their lives to steal Moonflower petals and distribute the elixir to those who need it most--but it's still not enough.

As rumors spread that the cure no longer works and sparks of rebellion begin to flare, a particularly cruel act from the King's Justice makes Tessa desperate enough to try the impossible: sneaking into the palace. But what she finds upon her arrival makes her wonder if it's even possible to fix Kandala without destroying it first.

General Impressions

Even though I have seen this cover around for a few months, I only got it thanks to my Fairyloot subscription. While I started it pretty much immediately because I was in the mood for some YA Fantasy, much of that enthusiasm was directed at Brigid Kemmerer, author of the Cursebreakers series and someone I've been hearing about for quite a while.

For the first one hundred pages, I was in awe of this book, devouring pages until I couldn't physically keep my eyes open. I was convinced this was going to be if not a five star read, then a very high four, which is rare for me when it comes to the genre.

I was enjoying the writing, there was a cohesive if not too deep world-building that could always be expanded upon in the sequel, the plot was easy to grasp and extremely relatable thanks to our plague-ridden times and the characters blended a lot of our favourite tropes with their unique personalities and problems which is the crack-cocaine of fandom culture. And more importantly, this story gave us an (anti-)hero that was actually scary, think Kaz Brekker levels of scary, but less ruthless or smart, even though the author tried to convince us otherwise.

From the heroine that was an easy crier and spoke truth to power even when fearing for her life to the cruel princes that loved each other and lived in fear of being assassinated the way their kind parents were, this was a book about people, not prospective heroes, people caught in impossible situations, where they could only act no matter the consequences or die and be forgotten. So we end with a book filled with trauma, confusion and no way out, other than trying to survive one more hour, one more day and nothing more.

All that masterful tension ended up ultimately going nowhere, or more concretely, ended up being nothing more than the classic YA tropey big battle where the right people are caught and calamity is avoided. The book ends with no answers and a few romantic or in this case, almost that scenes that force the reader to get the sequel in hopes of some kind of gratification. All the chances where the tension could be multiplied there were ignored and so my already faint interest in the couple fizzled out.

I think my biggest problem with this book was that this is a story about disenfranchisement and being disadvantaged by a class system, where the author either likes her privileged characters too much to hold them accountable or honestly sympathises with the oppressors so after a while the main characters just go in circles, agreeing with whoever they are closest too, king or rebels. Seriously, even the final 'battle' where the rebels were making all the right points and the only reason the king finally heard them was that they had bombed his palace and captured those who had oppressed them, is brushed under the rug and turned into a cringe-fest when the hero arrives with the 'evil guy' and the rebels put their trust in the heroine. The king and nobles go back to their houses and palaces and everyone else just had to believe that the same people that killed their friends and made no move to help them or hear their cries would just know better now. There is not even a hint of a want to want to dismantle such an unfair system farther than solving the pandemic. As long as the princes are pretty and tortured heroes, it's alright to be stuck in the middle ages, but I guess that's YA for you or at least the YA I thought we were past.

While some of the problems in this book can be traced to a pair of young and traumatized rulers forced to trust only on one another and present a cruel, threatening front to everyone else, they are still to blame for the crimes perpetrated against their own people, often by them and the way they turned a blind eye to the crimes of those that surrounded them. And yet, this was the most American ending ever, where the savage oppressed reach an illusion of freedom because the people in power kindly realised that the world was unfair. Oh, the shock!

Again and again, scenes in which common people threw rocks at the military, organized themselves so they could steal back medicine that was being kept from them or fought back in ANY way was said to be as bad or worse than the greed of a few engineering mass suffering and thousands of deaths so they could make a profit, all the while pushing for harsher laws and punishments on working people. After years of dying from a disease that was making some very rich, the final chapters paint the rebels as villains, painstakingly describing all the violence and death that they had caused when they bombed the palace while those who had caused harm with actions or inaction are seen as only the victims. I know all these injustices might have been mentioned and never addressed on purpose in order to make the next book even more hard-hitting but I doubt it.

I also wasn't a fan of the old YA trope of excusing a heroes terrible actions by telling us later that the people he hurt were rapists, harassers or hurt women in other forms in order to excuse all his sins and make him more desirable and that happened several times here, particularly when it came to excusing his execution or murder of common people and yet the same rules were never used when it came to punishing those that were part of the nobility or the military. Those could commit all the crimes they wanted and come out fresh as daisies... this stank of Blue Lives Matter in how those in charge of policing the land were a collective, indistinguishable, unanimous force blamed for nothing, they were just going their jobs and people were being so mean to them!

Conclusions

This will be my last Kemmerer for a while I think. I definitely won't be reading/buying the sequel since I had to force myself to get through the last chapters.

For those that might think that I was too harsh, I do admit that there was plenty good about this story from the plot twists to the world-building to the characters themselves but more than repetitive, this was a story that took several wrong turns from me.

Rating: 2.5/5