DEFY THE NIGHT

RELEASED 14 SEPTEMBER 496 pages | Paperback/ebook

Author Brigid Kemmerer

Publisher Bloomsbury YA

The path of true love may not run smoothly, but sometimes it really does run stupidly.

In a kingdom riven by disease, young King Harristan and his brother Prince Corrick, who holds the position of King’s Justice, are maintaining a grip on power by giving an impression of ruthlessness. At the lowest level of society, apothecary Tessa and her friend Wes steal ingredients for the cure to the fever from the rich, to give to the poor.

You can understand Tessa loving her brave companion. You can understand, if not sympathise with, the levels Corrick will go to to protect his brother, having seen their parents murdered. What is extremely hard to understand is how Tessa can spend years watching immense cruelty towards her people, to the point of advocating direct rebellion, only to suddenly start bothsidesing everything when faced with the knowledge that poor Corrick is in fact very sad about feeding people to tigers, shooting them with crossbows at public executions, and so on.

That said, neither is the sharpest tool in the box; you’ll have worked out who’s stirring up trouble, how, and why, before the lovers have had their obligatory romantic dinner. You can forgive a conspiracy being weak in a novel geared towards romance, but Corrick’s just too unlikely an object of affection for the romance to work well either. Miriam Mcdonald