Review Detail

For Darkness Shows the Stars is beautiful. Peterfreund deserves a round of applause for the way she played with my emotions.

When I picked up For Darkness Shows the Stars I thought to myself: “okay epic romance, let’s do this thing!” But when Malakai finally shows up on the pages I was all “No. Way. Kick him in the shins, Elliot! Throw something at him! Run away! But whatever you do don’t you dare fall for him in the end.” But then Kai slowly started being nice to Elliot and I started falling for him just as much as Elliot. By the end I was ready to cry buckets of tears if something came between them. What I’m trying to say by all this is: Diana Peterfruend is a master of emotions. I wasn’t just going with the flow of the story; I really got swept up into it.

Elliot is an admirable character. She does everything that actually matters (such as managing the money, caring for the workers, and making sure everyone has enough to eat) on the family estate and gets none of the credit. In fact, her father basically thinks of her entire existence as a nuisance. The thing is, though, Elliot doesn’t even care for the credit. She just wants to keep her Posts cared for and safe. The Posts that Elliot is close to are great side characters, especially Dee and Ro. They may not be main characters, but you really get a sense for who they are and I rather liked that.

Then, of course, there’s Malakai. We get a sense of who he is before he even steps foot in the pages because the reader has both Elliot’s memory and Kai’s old letters to her to work with. But then Malakai Wentforth actually comes into the story and basically blows all that out of the water. He’s mean and unnecessarily cruel to Elliot and I hated him. Over time he grows much less prickly and grew on me fast. Basically, Kai/Malakai is a rather complex character who I applaud Peterfuend for.

The world itself is fairly fleshed out. I could have done with more back-story and talk of the dystopian aspect, but when the day arrives that I don’t want more dystopian descriptions and back-story I’ll be rather shocked.

The Nutshell: For Darkness Shows the Stars is a fantastic futuristic romance. I’m not one who usually enjoys a story with a romantic focal point, but I adored this one. If you like strong heroines and jerky boys who are actually nice then you definitely need to read this.

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