Cyndere’s Midnight by Jeffrey Overstreet

House Abascar is regrouping after the traumatic quake, slowly one by one people are finding out who lived and who died in the kingdom. Turning from Abascar “Cyndere’s Midnight” focuses on House Bel Amica’s princess as she goes though hardships most people can’t even dream of dealing with. Trying to run from the power hungry Seers and get some time to think Cyndere goes to a secluded fort. Slipping out of her room at night she goes to a clearing, there she is nearly killed by a beastman. But this beast is more of a man then the others of his race. Could Cyndere’s dream of saving the beastman from their curse come true with this creature?

This book wasn’t nearly as good as the last book in the series. Now Cyndere and the others were created well, but I didn’t feel like I could relate to her, or the others like I did last time. A big thing I had trouble with is something called the Keeper, it is designed to be a mystery to pull you through the book but I found it annoying. We know of this thing and having everything dragged out and learning nothing got really old, fast.  

A friend described the book as a modern “Beauty and the Beast” and it was. The plot was predicable, to the point it was slow. Sadly, I feel asleep reading this book twice (at times I was NOT sleep deprived). I just couldn’t get into this story, something that didn’t help was the multiple perspectives and then the fact everyone was on slightly different times. This made the book very confusing, Ale Boy might be two days behind Cal-raven, while Cyndere was hours ahead of Krawg’s time line. It just had me baffled.  

Something I would like to point out, this is the second book in the series. By looking at the cover art you would have no idea it is part of a series. The cover says “A Novel” like it should stand alone, yet you couldn’t pick this book up and understand what is going on without reading “Auralia’s Colors”. This was a huge problem I have with the books in general.

Now this book was interesting just very, very slow. I couldn’t get into it, but since Auralia’s Colors was good I’ll continue on in the series. 

C