Shadow of Night

This book took me forever to finish. I put it down for a few months and then I decided to pick it back up last week and finish it. I was literally forcing myself to finish which only made me dislike the book more, but I was so close to being done I just couldn't abandon it altogether.

I didn't absolutely love the first book, but I liked it enough to start this one. I do not enjoy historical fiction books very often so for me, this book was already at a disadvantage. But what really did it for me was that everything was sooooooo slow!

It felt like Diana and Matthew assumed that since they went back in time hundreds of years they had hundreds of years to do what they needed to do. Every way they went about doing things made no sense, had no finesse, was the longest route to get where they needed to be. We had to read pages of Diana practicing her handwriting. Her handwriting! Why is this relevant to the plot? And there were so many characters it was impossible to keep anything straight. I kept having to go back to find where a character was introduced to remember where they came from and what their purpose was. Generally, they had no purpose. It reminded me of the Nicholas Flamel books. So many historical figures shoved into a book just so that the author could hit some record for fictional name dropping.

Basically, this trilogy is a thinly veiled, pouting rip-off of Twilight disguising itself as an adult novel. But of course, I have to eventually read the last book to find out how they beat the Volturi.