reviews_and_ramblings | Dark Designs by Luisa Prieto

You have to bring a lot of patience and passion when you will start this book, and you have to save them till the end and beyond. Dark Designs is a more than 400 pages book and it’s only the beginning of a series, which, from what I understand, will have the same two main characters as leads.

Everything is complex in this book, from the intricate plot, switching back and forward in time, from the darkness of a past age with knights and mages, to the even too much light of modern time, where sometime the darkness would be welcomed to cover the ugliness of today. It’s also complex in the writing style, the author spent a lot of time to create her own language, mixing English, with Spanish and French, and yes also Italian, and I well know how much she took care in doing it, since I checked the Italian part of the story. It’s also complex in the relationship between the two men, probably one of the first time I read a book where the main heroes barely meet; true, as I told before, this is only the first book in a series, and maybe the author needed time for the world building and in the following books she will let her characters live inside it.

It’s strange since Kyler Withers, journalist and teacher, winner of a Pulitzer, who decided to join a small College instead of a big Ivy League, virtually meets Sorin, student in the same college, practically in the first pages, while Kyler is reading the college paper Sorin is editing. But then both of them are “kidnapped” by the Darkness, or better by two ambassadors, Rhune and Avery; and the author didn’t save the reader, and Kyler and Sorin, from anything, all the bad experiences are their to be lived, from having to witness the murders of innocent kids, to the one of your best friend. They are all proofs the Darkness is powerful and it doesn’t like t be ignored. Page after page the reader is waiting for the moment when Kyler will meet (again? eventually?) Sorin, something he was teased from the very beginning, something he understands is written in the stars, of better in their blood, but page after page he is delusional, it seems never the time.

In a way, especially for Kyler, I think that the Darkness is not a stranger, but it’s your half, like the Devil and the Angel playing on your shoulders, and when one is stronger than the other, you chosen path in life follow the consequences. Take modern Kyler for example, he is grieving from the bad experience he had in Colombia, he is continuously saying that he fears what he was, above all since he doesn’t remember; but then he wrote a book, and that book won a Pulitzer, and Kyler is the first to admit that it was his dream comes true… what if unconsciously Kyler is doing all of it basically to accomplice his thirst of recognition? What if he is paying his tribute to the Darkness in a macabre barter?

If you are starting this book with the attitude of reading 440 pages, filled till capacity of events, but hoping to find a resolution in the end, change your path. 440 pages are only the starters, and to complete your meal you will have to stay a lot of time with these men… after all, we are speaking of hundreds of years for them to wait, what is for us some months to know their complete story? This is not a light book, on the contrary, it’s quite oppressive, sometime even distasteful; it’s for sure more a dark fantasy than a romance: the characters have to let the Darkness go out in plain sight, to be finally free from it, but to do so, they have to fight and not in a fair play.

http://www.mlrbooks.com/ShowBook.php?book=DARKDSGN (print book)

http://www.aspenmountainpress.com/new-releases/dark-designs/prod_247.html (ebook)

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Amazon: Dark Designs

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Cover Art by Anne Cain

Dark Designs by Luisa Prieto

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