I wanted to start the year off with an ARC book (doing my part to help indie authors and discover some fresh talent), so I scrolled through BookSirens. This one caught my interest, and the due date worked well for me.

Read: January 1 – January 5, 2024
*Self-published author

Genre: Fantasy, Supernatural
Audience: Young Adult
Book contains: disappearance, death, murder, mild profanity

Purchase a copy from Amazon.ca

[I received a free copy of this book and am voluntarily leaving a review.]

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A Unique Take on Vampires!

It’s the first blood moon since the death of Maggie’s parents, and she’s not sure she’s ready for it. Every time it happens, someone in the town of Wisteria Falls vanishes, and this one just so happens to fall upon Halloween, the night of the biggest party of the year. Being a teen, Maggie sneaks out, much to her uncle Byron’s protest, and that’s when the danger begins.

I took a quick peek at some of the previous reviews of this book before reading, so I knew ahead of time that this book would feature vampires in a unique way, but I was still pleasantly surprised. Instead of every other modern vampire novel, this book takes the much more traditional Dracula vampire MO, with our heroes being vampire hunters. Surprisingly, it was also a lot shorter than I expected (about half the length of other books in the genre).

To read this book, I downloaded a free copy from BookSirens, the ARC reading site. I received it in epub format, which I admittedly converted into a Word Document so I could use the Read Aloud function. (I have trouble reading eBooks.)

The Other Side of Daylight is written in first person from Maggie’s perspective and is told in present tense. The tense gives it a more urgent feel, as there is no guarantee that Maggie will live to the end of the book.

Maggie is a typical teenage high school student, though after her parents died when she was fifteen, she went to live with her great uncle Byron in his creepy Victorian-style manor. She, along with the rest of the town, sees him as eccentric and superstitious, which causes Maggie problems when she wants to go to her best friend’s Halloween party on the night of the blood moon. During their dry run of sneaking out of the house, she runs into the mysterious Ferreira Storm, youngest of the Storm brothers, the local bad boys in town with a reputation for trouble.

Maggie has a close relationship with her best friend Rae, though everyone is always walking on eggshells around Maggie when the topic of the blood moon comes up. Most of the book, however, takes place with Maggie and Ferreira working together; because of this, their relationship takes a few steps forward. For the most part, this book is action and mystery without much romance, which I liked. Though it’s not without mention of it! At the end, as all the other strings and loose ends were being tied up, the hints here and there from the rest of the book culminate into something new as well.

There were a few things about the relationships that I didn’t like, though. For example, the concept of fated soulmates isn’t for me, though I know other people like it. Nor do I find it interesting when one person talks about “being drawn” to another person as if by a magnetic force, as if that’s the only thing making them want to be with that person (as opposed to liking the person’s personality or having natural chemistry). Overall, very minor complaints that didn’t take away from the rest of the story.

Chartier’s writing style is mostly simple—good for young adult readers—and there are moments of humour and teen sarcasm thrown in.

as I said, it was pretty fast paced. The book is only around 50,000 words instead of the usual 80 to 120k that these books usually have, but it wasn’t packed to the brim with details. The characters were following clues and on a mission. There was enough action that it felt sufficiently full without being too long to drag on.

This book is great for lovers of supernatural fiction. A shorter novel packed with action and intrigue.

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