Ever the Night Road by Michael Breen book review

Ever the Night Road feels like a coming of age adventure novel, driven very much by a main protagonist that feels lost about her place in the world, with what she wants being denied to her by the world. You add in some soft magic, some horror elements, and a grand sense of mysticism and lost histories, knowledge, magic, and grandeur and you have an excellent, and often evocative, setting for a young adventurer. From an upscale district, to the mysterious and secretive ruins or old, and the dangerous, ghost haunted underbelly of the main, we are presented with a grand variety of engaging places and scenes, most operating in a tangibly different way from the others, and evocatively described to elicit all the desired emotions.

Our main character is solid, likable, and well-realized. The secondary characters are solid as well, but lack the same amount of screen time. Despite this, the side characters still fit well into the story and world, helping to bring both to life.

One of my only real qualms is that the plot felt a bit lost sometimes; the core driving elements of the narrative don’t appear in the narrative until after the first quarter or third of the book, and almost immediately supplant the narrative that the first third of the book was setting up. The first third of the book focused heavily on Dagny and her desire to be an adventurer, as well as her first real adventure; it’s a little slow in places, but generally fairly light. The subsequent two thirds grow significantly darker, and Dagny’s core desire to be an adventure is almost entirely forgotten in the light of the new driving plot elements. It’s not that these new plot elements are bad or un-engaging (quite the contrary) just that they don’t reconcile well with Dagny’s desire to be an adventurer, either as a reality check showing her the reality of that life or as a beginning of the fulfill of that desire. Part of it is because Dagny herself undergoes a variety of adventures in strange places and yet remarks upon them, even when those adventures are actively frightening, or traumatic. (Something to praise in the book is that Dagny goes through a lot, and is both changed by her experiences, but also very much scarred by them in a believable way.)

Finally, Ever the Night Roads sticks it landing, providing the reader with a clear vision of the type of story future books in the series are intended to be. The ending is tense and incomplete (because series) while teasing the readers with a new, fantastical and unsettling adventure.