Courting Darkness (Otherworld #10) by Yasmine Galenorn
Hyto, Smoky’s ancient and lethal draconic father, has finished threatening from afar and is finally making good on his threat to make Camille suffer – blaming her for how much face he lost in the Draconic world.
Having a powerful White Dragon hunting you is a terrifying situation – but with friends falling into portals and the Elder Fae lurking around and running amok, Camille can hardly hide.
But nor can she escape the grasp – and tortures – of her ancient, sadistic father-in-law.
Ok, a little unfair, but I can’t help but be a little disappointed in this book – primarily because the series were getting better. Better written, more focused world building and characterisation, more pointful storylines and at least some of the bloat corralled – or if there was going to be bloat at least it would be USEFUL bloat. So did Blood Wyne advance the main story? No. But it expanded relevant world building – the vampires – and developed Menolly’s character and relationships (and introduced new plot lines that weren’t all that essential but the Otherworld series loves its side tracks). So bloat – but bloat with a purpose.
But this?
The main storyline centres around Camille and Smoky’s evil father. Already that’s going to be shaky because Smoky’s evil father has been a pointless background looming adding nothing to the whole series for a very long time – it was the very definition of a storyline that could have been cut. It has added nothing in 9 books except angst and it adds nothing now. It wasn’t even used as an avenue to develop Smoky’s character to explore the dragons’ world building. It did nothing to advance the world building or the meta plot
Nor did it develop Camille’s character – unless we consider additional trauma to be a necessary expansion of her character (I don’t). We don’t see her develop any real connection to Aeval yet, despite joining the Unseelie court in a week (the whole book covers about that long). There’s nothing really from her relationship with the Moon Mother, her magic – or, well, anything.
About the only change to anything when this book finishes is Camille has some more scars and trauma and they pick up a grateful refugee to act as a maid.
The main plot line is pointless.
The secondary plot lines? Chase goes on a magical mystery tour of the Astral in which we have ELDER FAE (scary music) who are there… to be Elder Fae. I mean the concept was introduced last book and we’re going to just have them scattered about this book for… reasons. It kind of ruined the whole sense of the Elder Fae as a major super-rare terrifying unique forces around to have so many of them scattered around. Herne drops in to, I dunno, have massive genitals I think, because I have no clue why else he was there. The whole storyline felt like a clumsy addition – maybe it should have been broken off as a short story or just ignored as completely and utterly unnecessary.
Throw in some more randomness – let’s have Sephra drop in to top up Camille’s daddy issues because how else will we deal without epic catastrophic angst? Seriously he served no other purpose. He literally dropped in to repeat how much he’s disowning Camille.
