Beware: Mild spoilers lie ahead.
The Mark of Dreams and Darkness is the second book of the Mark of Creation Chronicles. I reviewed the first book, The Mark of Chaos and Creation, back in August of 2024.
I enjoyed Dreams and Darkness, and gave it a four-star rating on Goodreads, but I wish I had enjoyed it even more than I did. In truth, I think my rating is more like three-and-a-half stars that I rounded up to four because Goodreads doesn’t allow half-stars.
The book continues the story of Kara as she fights to rescue a friend from the dark prince Malakyte. She decides to enter the Titan Games, which is something similar to the Hunger Games, but not quite.
I was having quite a bit of fun until I started running across things that signalled to me the author was in too much of a rush to get the book finished that she didn’t stop to do her homework properly. In particular, there’s a car that Kara has to drive during the games, and the author has a character (who should be knowledgeable about cars) describe the vehicle as having both four cylinders but a “V-12” engine. A simple search on Google would have avoided this.
The author’s marketing for this book totes it as being “the villain gets the girl”, but when it came down to it, I was disappointed in how exactly that played out. Instead of Malakyte successfully wooing Kara to his side as I expected (hoped for), he cheats by brainwashing her—raping her conscious mind and altering her memories. I had been low-key cheering for him until that point. I feel like the choice did a disservice to both characters. Even though it is a villainous act, I just feel that Malakyte ought to have wanted Kara to come to him of her own free will. He was working on getting her there already. It would have been nice to see her make that choice for herself instead of being forced into it.
I plan on reading the third book once it releases, because I really do want to see how everything plays out. Maybe Malakyte will come to regret his decision. Maybe he won’t. We’ll just have to see.
Three-point-five stars.
