A Drop of Night

Received from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Cover image and synopsis from Goodreads:

Seventeen-year-old Anouk has finally caught the break she’s been looking for—she's been selected out of hundreds of other candidates to fly to France and help with the excavation of a vast, underground palace buried a hundred feet below the suburbs of Paris. Built in the 1780's to hide an aristocratic family and a mad duke during the French Revolution, the palace has lain hidden and forgotten ever since. Anouk, along with several other gifted teenagers, will be the first to set foot in it in over two centuries.

Or so she thought.

But nothing is as it seems, and the teens soon find themselves embroiled in a game far more sinister, and dangerous, than they could possibly have imagined. An evil spanning centuries is waiting for them in the depths. . .

A genre-bending thriller from Stefan Bachmann for fans of The Maze Runner and Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods.

You cannot escape the palace.

You cannot guess its secrets.

I was super intrigued by the premise of this book. I was really interested in history and the French Revolution when I was younger, so this sounded right up my alley (and I LOVE that cover).

It’s a great idea, but in execution this didn’t really work for me. Despite the bonkers story and action that takes place, this felt slow and a little boring at times. I so wanted to love this. Maybe it was a disconnect between what I wanted/expected the book to be and what it ended up being, which is fine, not every book is for everyone. And to be clear, I didn’t dislike this. It was pretty entertaining at times, but I maybe went into it with really high hopes/expectations, which it didn’t quite live up to.

So this was not bad but not great, for me.