Okay: the first half of this post is not going to be the review. Here’s the tl;dr: this series is easily the best thing I’ve read this year. The first half of this post is going to be about me being a dumbass. It’s related to these books! But it’s not a book review, and I just wanted to make it clear that I know what I’m putting you through. You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to, and I’ll put in a divider. But go read these regardless.

Anyway. If you pay attention to my Unread Shelf series, you’ll know that this book has been sitting on my shelf for a while:

And yet, that book was pretty clearly not in my Monthly Reads pile a couple of days ago– and while I didn’t show the front covers, you’d be correct if you assumed that the copies of the trilogy in that post matched the image at the top of this one. So what’s the deal? Did I buy a second copy of Nevernight?

Sigh. Yes.

I sat on this trilogy for a minute, and I’ve been getting into the rather unwise habit lately of ordering entire trilogies at once, or getting just a little bit into the first book and then making a call that, at least once, has bitten me in the ass. And when I went to Amazon to order Godsgrave and Darkdawn, I encountered a problem: Godsgrave wasn’t available in an edition that matched my copy of Nevernight. But there was a three-book set readily available for, as it turned out, less than it was going to cost me to go to Barnes & Noble and pick up matching copies of Vols. 2 and 3, since Amazon is so much cheaper than B&N. So I could go to B&N and — hopefully, if they were in stock — pick up 2 & 3 that matched my pre-existing copy of 1, but spend more money than it would cost to order all three in the new covers, which, to be honest, I preferred– but ordering the three-book set put me in the rather ridiculous position of owning two copies of a book I hadn’t read yet.

I chose to save money and get the prettier covers, which turned out to be the UK edition, so why Amazon was pushing them on me so hard is kind of unclear at the moment. Point is, though, I’ve got an extra copy of Nevernight floating around, so if you think this sounds up your alley, if you wanna Cashapp me the cost of postage I’ll send it to you.

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I’ve already said this twice, including once in this post, but let me say it again for those of you who may have jumped past the divider: this series is the best thing I’ve read this year. I know I get book-drunk and I get super enthusiastic when I like shit; I have sat on this post long enough to have read a whole entire other book in between, and you’ll get a review of that one tomorrow, probably. Where I’m really running into trouble, though, is figuring out how to talk about what’s good about it, in part because this is very much a Not for Everyone type of series. The main character, Mia, is an unrepentant asshole with a vicious temper and a tendency to charge into shit. Jay Kristoff is not interested in letting his characters be happy. And the series is hellaciously violent. It’s not as relentlessly dark as, say, the Poppy War books were, but you’re going to get your heart ripped out on more than one occasion in this series and Mia’s solution to any given problem tends to be to try to kill it.

And Mia is very, very good at killing. Assassin main characters are becoming a cliché if they’re not there already, but this is two series in a row (the first being David Dalglish’s Vagrant Gods, which shares a fair amount of DNA with this series) where the main character’s job was basically “killer” and the author had no interest in backing off from that at all. Dalglish’s Cyrus is a political revolutionary, where Kristoff’s Mia becomes a literal priestess of the goddess of murder over the course of the first book. Both series are explicitly revenge fantasies. Nevernight features copious footnotes, mostly used for snarky worldbuilding. As a deep and abiding lover of worldbuilding, I loved them; I can imagine them getting on certain readers’ nerves.

So, yeah: the overall arc? Mia’s parents are dead and she wants to kill the men responsible. We’ve seen that before. She joins the assassins in order to get the training she needs to be able to get close to the man responsible for her father’s death, who, rather inconveniently, happens to be imperator. Also not the most unique plot line imaginable. And then the first book really doesn’t end quite the way you thought it was going to, and you literally gasp at one point, and then you kick your opinion of the series up a couple of notches, and then maybe … midway through the second book, as you’re enjoying yourself, and grooving on the cool magic/religious system Kristoff’s got set up …

… all fucking hell breaks loose, and the series never calms down after that. I have never been happier to have Book 3 of a series already on hand after finishing Book Two, as it ends with so many massive revelations and cliffhanger shit that I literally screamed at one point while reading. If I had had to wait for Kristoff to write Book Three I’d have had to find out where he lived and stalk him to get some answers. Book Three is literally insane in a way that I can’t describe without spoilers. At one point the page formatting is used to give you a subtle hint about something that’s going on. Like, I can’t tell you a single word about Book Three. I don’t want you to know anything. Just that you’re going to get knocked on your ass over and over and over again and no one is safe, ever.

And I was really glad that I’d bought the series with the covers I got, and no, I’m not explaining that either, but you’ll understand when you finish the series. Which you are going to read.

Kristoff has one completed series out there and has another where he’s two books in out of (I think) three, and that one has vampires, and I’m excited to read it anyway. I’m just going to wait until the whole thing is out and then buy all three of them, because I do not trust this man to not destroy my sanity any longer.

Go spend money, dammit.