The Dark Days Club by Alison Goodman

The Dark Days Club (Lady Helen Trilogy, #1)

by Alison Goodman

The first book in the dark and compelling Lady Helen trilogy, set during the Regency period, will appeal to teenagers and adults alike. London during the Season is a whirl of balls, dinners and promenades – and, for a select few, the relentless battle against demons.

Jane Austen's high society and Cassandra Clare's supernatural underworld collide in the first book in the Lady Helen trilogy, perfect for fans of historical fiction and fantasy.

London, April 1812. Lady Helen Wrexhall is set to make her curtsey to Queen Charlotte and step into polite Regency Society. Unbeknownst to Helen, that step will also take her from the glittering ballroom of Almack's and the bright lights of Vauxhall Gardens into a shadowy world of demonic creatures, missing housemaids and deadly power.

Standing between those two worlds is Lord Carlston, a man of dubious reputation and infuriating manners. He believes Helen is destined to protect humanity, but all he can offer is danger, savagery and the possibility of madness. Not the kind of destiny suitable for a young lady in her first London Season. This delightfully dangerous adventure of self-discovery and difficult choices has all the unnerving dark magic of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and the swashbuckling action of The Scarlet Pimpernel.

Reviewed by Amber on

2 of 5 stars

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This review was originally posted on Books of Amber

I was so ready to dive into The Dark Days Club and absolutely adore it. Eon has to be one of the earliest hyped fantasy books in the YA community, and I have had it sitting on my shelf unread for years. Everyone loves it, and everyone has recommended it to me. So you can imagine how excited I was to have a month of reading everything by Alison Goodman, right?

Well, whatever excitement I was feeling was killed after about fifty pages of The Dark Days Club. I tried, I really did. I tried so hard. But the book was too slow for my liking, and I just couldn't get into it quick enough to love it. Things were great in the beginning, but just before the whole paranormal world is revealed to Lady Helen things just got really, really slow.

Then there was a huge info-dump after Helen discovered this secret club. Information was (almost) literally thrown at me over and over again, and the characters kept explaining all of this stuff about demons that really should have been shown to me instead. 

As for the characters, I liked Helen. She was all right. But she's the only one I felt even the slightest connection with, which is to say she is the only one who is fleshed out enough to read about. I was probably meant to like Carlston as well, and there were moments where I did, but overall he was very dull and failed to catch my interest.

The Dark Days Club reminds me a lot of The Diviners, in the sense that it was slow, the world building was in the background, and there wasn't a decent ship. I still want to read Eon though, because DRAGONS.

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  • Started reading
  • 24 February, 2016: Finished reading
  • 24 February, 2016: Reviewed