Book Review: Dark Destiny

3/5 STARS

Genre: Dark Fantasy
Author: Thomas Grave
Published: October 2015
Pages: 364 {e-books}

Initial thoughts:

I’ve got a lot of mixed feelings about this book. It was a really entertaining read with thoughtful representations of the afterlife, Angels, and death – but some other things had my head spinning in confusion.

Dark Destiny

Dark Destiny was kindly sent to me by Grave in exchange for an honest review and I was more than happy to oblige. Seriously, have you even read the synopsis for this book? It sounds awesome! Everything about this story was utterly unique from anything else I’ve read and I really enjoyed reading it.

This is the story of young boy who, as it turns out, is the reincarnation of death, a pretty huge responsibility if you ask me. The story begins with an interesting tale of these two soul mates taking a boat out onto a lake. There were dark forces at play that day. What occurs on that lake sets the stage for everything that is to come and also ties in to a wonderful plot twist that I didn’t see coming. Everything about this book is so intriguing and I really enjoyed Grave’s representation of purgatory – utterly terrifying and dark. If you’re worried that this book might be overly religious at any point then I can safely assure you that it’s not. This is kick-ass fantasy.

So, what happens?

Now, it’s actually really tricky to review this in further detail without spoiling you to anything. There’s plenty of action in the book, Sebastian takes us through a whirlwind of fighting scenes as he stumbles through learning what his new role as Death means. There are a handful of baddies out there to get at him for various reasons and of course the fantastical and super-natural elements to this book pave the way for some truly epic fight scenes. There are themes of both love and friendship throughout as our characters are young and all trying to discover who they are. I thought a lot of the ‘other-worldly’ characters were quite cool and I was very anxious to discover where everything was leading. You might be wondering, then, why I haven’t rated this book a little higher. It was mostly a case of a great story with just a few elements that didn’t quite make sense to me and one or two missed opportunities.

Where I frowned over the rim of my teacup . . .

Sebastian seemed to accept the fact that he was Death very quickly. Perhaps this was his age, but he was quick to the mark to start using his new found powers to get what he wanted and I thought there was a lack of freaking out involved. If someone told me I was Death I think I would’ve passed out, freaked out, shouted a lot, you know, the usual. The fact that he was somewhat selfish and silly in doing using his powers purely for his own wants was fine, it was a character flaw. But he never stops at any point to actually consider the consequences of what he was doing. Considering how obvious I would have thought it was that his powers weren’t to be treated lightly, he just ploughed ahead and did things anyway. This frustrated me a lot.

On top of this he’s also never really taught within the book how to use his powers. This was fine to begin with, I assumed he would just be gradually taught as time progressed the do’s and don’ts of his role. Nope. This was probably one of the main things that annoyed me. It made the whole thing less serious and less tied together than I would have liked. I think there was a lot of room (and time) to further develop his character if this had occurred. The fact that Sebastian went head-first into the action as he did instead of taking half an hour to sit down with the ‘Elder’ to talk things over seemed silly. If I had these powers I’d stop everything and read the handbook to make sure I didn’t do any serious damage to myself or others. A bit like time travel.

The last thing that annoyed me was that everything seemed to unravel really slowly. Personally, I think this could have been even better if the pace had been upped a notch (and more pages used to explain things rather than fighting, fighting, fighting).

Despite these apparent negatives I still really enjoyed the story and certainly enjoyed the way that Death works in this world.

To view a spoiler click HERE to be redirected to Goodreads where it will be ‘hidden’ at this point in the review.

Summary

Overall, I really enjoyed this book and think it had some awesome things going for it. I’m not sure if I will read the sequel yet, but I’m glad that I had the opportunity to read the first. For those of you interested in reading it it’s only about $3.00 (US, I think) on Amazon right now, so bargain! There are some great action scenes and a well written plot twist but in general I think the book fell down on its distribution of time. More time on developing Sebastian, in particular, and linking up the different time periods that the plot half-heartedly straddles could have made this into a whopper of a story. But for now, I will leave it as greatly entertaining and unique in its own way.