TL;DR: More patriarchal abuse, less market than you’d expect.
Source: NetGalley, so many thanks to the publisher!
Plot: Oriana is treated incredibly poorly by everyone, including her twin and the Secret Market plays a small part in helping her fight.
Characters: Honestly I was overwhelmed by how mean so many of these characters were.
Setting: I wish we’d gotten more of the Market but Italy was lovely.
Fantasy: Far lighter touch than you’d expect.
Summary:
Just beyond the waking edges of Lucerìa, an 18th-century town in the kingdom of Naples, lies the Night: an enigmatic fiefdom governed by seven immortals and fueled by Moira, the power to reshape one’s destiny.
On this porous border separating Day from Night, Oriana spends her time fantasizing about becoming a smith in her father’s forge and eavesdropping on whispered tales of beasts and men who roam the nocturnal realm. But in the Night, these stories come alive, as Oriana saw for herself after she inadvertently trespassed into the Secret Market of the Dead, where vendors hawk Moira to those desperate enough to accept its immeasurably steep price.
Years later, when her father chooses her twin brother to succeed him, Oriana challenges her sibling to a series of trials to determine the forge’s true heir. But as the twins’ fierce competition escalates, with the town and her own family set firmly against her, Oriana realizes that to break free from the stifling confines of Day, she must once again embrace the Night—and, as always, everything comes with a cost.
Thoughts:
For a book called The Secret Market of the Dead, you’d think we’d spend a lot of time in a secret market. Instead we get maybe 40 pages of Market and another 200 odd pages of inconsistent characters and frustration.
Oriana is a young woman in 18th century Naples. Her twin brother Oriano and pretty much everyone around her treats her horribly, especially her mother. The bulk of the story is just this near constant abuse. For a brief 30 pages we see Oriana visit the Secret Market of the Dead, then for the rest of the novel it’s simple her struggling against those that would put her down. Oriana herself is incredibly naive but still considers herself more intelligent than others, making for a frustratingly hardheaded heroine.
Add to that the absolutely frustrating ending, and this one wasn’t for me. The characters were either terrible or simply inconsistent. I didn’t attach to anyone, especially Oriana. And the Market I was promised never truly took off.
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