Black City

Hello Darklings,

This book was a bit of an emotional whirlwind. There was a lot of slamming the book closed and shaking my head in annoyance. A lot of confused facial expressions and overall exasperation. I did get through it though.


The emotional pit I fell into was Black City by Elizabeth Richards. There's a half-human boy who's trying to make ends meet and fight off the loneliness of being the only one of his kind and a sheltered ditzy politicians daughter who doesn't understand how the world works. They meet on accident and it just so happens that afterwards they keep getting thrown together. Conflict and tension seem to brew with every step in Black City yet Ash and Natalie seem to only think of each other. What's up with that?

To be honest, I first picked up this book because the cover is sick. I didn't even realize it was a rose until yesterday, but it's awesome. Though I came for the cover, I stayed for the book. It was rough at some points. The main characters got irrationally angry at each other for little baby reasons or reasons they themselves caused (*cough cough* Natalie, stop means stop). Then some character will show up and try to mess up my ship. I was going to fight her.

I didn't like Natalie in the beginning. She was so ignorantly stupid it hurt. Like, you just gave your SLAVE an ownership bracelet tag thing, and you think she'd be happy about that? That you're giving her a tag and saying she belongs to you like she isn't a person? WTF. And then she'd say hurtful things on purpose then be like, oh maybe I shouldn't have said that. Actually no, she'd be like, ohhhh he's so scary. I don't know why he's so mean. It's not like I just provoked him or anything. I was literally going to fight her too. The only reason she had any sympathy from me was because her mom was a dick. She hated her for no reason and controlled all aspects of her life because "she wasn't capable of making reasonable decisions". Ugh. Ash was amazing though. Ash is bae.

'Twas a good book though, I enjoyed it. If the people chilled out a bit it would be better, but after reading the summary for the next one, it doesn't look that way at all. But whatever.

Ship: Ash and Natalie
Die: Sebastian, Emissary Mother, Evangeline,

7.5/10
~Book Panda