Unlock the Dark by Sasa Hawk

TL;DR: This has some great ideas but not-so-great execution.
Source: NetGalley, thank you to the publisher!

Plot: Elia is desperate to take care of her family, and ends up doing a favor to a prince that has huge ramifications.
Characters: I wasn’t a huge fan of anyone here to be honest. I felt for the Prince most of all.
Setting: The only place I felt grounded in the story was at Elia’s home but we didn’t spend much time there.
Fantasy/Romance: The fantasy parts of this were great. If this had been expanded to a longer series that would have been great. I didn’t buy this romance at all though.

Thoughts:

Unlock the Dark is an incredibly fast paced story about a young woman with a niche and handy power trying to take care of her family. Through some unfortunate decisions Elia ends up in a bad spot. Caught between bills piling up and the Death God’s temple she needs to make some money to save her family. So she makes an incredibly unwise decision to help a foolish prince and unleashes a beast.

There is a LOT packed into this book. And a lot of it can be traced back to our main character’s bad decisions. From her ‘history’ with the country she needs to take her prince too, to her use of her poor father as fuel for her lifestyle. That lead me as the reader to be very frustrated with her and consequently the whole book. This gal unleashed a horrible plague once by breaking and entering somewhere she should not. So what does she do? She does it again, TWICE.

I also really didn’t like the ‘take the glasses off and the girl is hot’ vibe I got from the prince. Elia has nothing but scorn for him till she sees him dressed up and all the sudden now he’s hot? I’ll pass. In fact the Prince, the more I think on it, bothers me as he has little to no personality besides his desire to stop a war. He felt very two dimensional which is likely why the romance fell flat as a rug for me.

This one was not my favorite. There was a lot of potential in the world and the ideas but the execution didn’t do anything for me. I can see this working for some readers, I just wasn’t that reader.