Okay, I'm baffled. Why does everybody love this book so much??I didn't particularly like anything about it. It was okay, but far from amazing. Knife was annoying. His constant bitching and snarling and all around meanness got on my nerves pretty fast. Yeah, I get that he's been through a lot. And yeah, I get that that doesn't make you a nice person. And I like characters with an attitude with rough edges. But Knife was over the top. He was way too nasty for me to like. And I have no idea why Aerie-Smith fell in love with him.Then there was virtually no world-building. That's a major pet peeve of mine. If you write fantasy, you'd better include at least some world building or you might as well just write contemporary.I liked that Knife was a real master at carving and I would have loved tor ead more about that. I wish we'd gotten a few scenes of him carving something that's not a chess piece.Overall, this book just didn't do much for me. I didn't like Knife all that much and there were no other characters to relate to. Aerie-Smith remained a faintly irritating shadow and we didn't really get to meet anybody else. I wish there'd been a few more scenes of Knife and/or Aerie-Smith interacting with the villagers.This book has a lot of unused potential and there was way too much fluff for me. But maybe I'm just really weird, because virtually everybody seems to love this... I feel a little conflicted about this book. There were parts of this book I really liked and there were parts I’m not so sure about. We have Naef, a man disfigured since birth. He gets asked to accompany Aerie-Smith to his enchanted island and live there for a year. Aerie-Smith walks and talks, but looks like a lion. He and his people have been cursed for the last 10 years. All of the other people on the island are full animals.When Naef arrives at the island he is surprised to see he is no longer disfigured, but beautiful instead. After spending some time on the island it is clear he and Aerie-Smith are falling for each other. They become very close and Naef feels safe for the first time in his life. But after one year he is to do a gruesome task to free the island and its inhabitants of its curse…I loved the take on the old beauty lies within message. I really liked the fact that Naef was not happy at first with his new looks. He was having trouble accepting he was now beautiful because he did not feel beautiful, especially on the inside. He needed to accept himself first.Aerie-Smith was a really kind person, but I did not get all warm inside while reading about him. I am not sure why, perhaps I am just shallow that way and was having trouble finding a man attractive who looked like a lion. I mean… the whole sex thing freaked me out at first. Thankfully Naef felt Aerie-Smith’s true body when he closed his eyes…. but I just could not stop thinking about freaky lion sex!Although I do like how Amy Lane writes, this book was definitely not one of her best stories. I felt there lacked a certain feel. Some events were quite long and descriptive while other events were barely mentioned (like the first time real sex was involved, I was waiting for this and then it already happened! I felt cheated…). I was waiting for something more a lot of the time, but Amy Lane did not deliver this time. Not like I know she can…
What do You think about Truth In The Dark (2010)?
I might review later...when my chest stops hurting and the tears dry up.
—NguyetNDMNa
