ABANDONED DARKNESS, the second Forest of Darkness novel by Kate Wendley, successfully builds on the first novel's plot, but the interesting ideas are lost in the many substantive and technical issues. I give it 2 stars.
In the novel, after reading Anthony's girlfriend, Kaia, Sebastian goes for a run to shut off Kaia's memories, thoughts and feelings, but when he returns home, his wolf is still in command. Sebastian makes a move on Jade, resulting in a surprising connection and outing their mutually "unrequited" romantic interest, but he doesn't remember it. After some gossip makes its way back to him, he and Jade can't deny their attraction. Sebastian has to learn how to trust Jade with his heart and how to risk rejection not only from her, but also from his pack. Having closed himself off from the people who rejected him years ago, Sebastian has some additional hurdles put in his path when Torin, his "second" and thorn in the flesh, attempts a truce.
Jade is also a fish out of water in her relationship with Sebastian. So many of her thoughts and opinions about herself and their world are challenged, and she has to decide whether to take a final leap of faith and show Sebastian how she feels before she loses him. Things come to a head the night of the full moon when danger threatens the pack. Meanwhile, Anthony is learning his new gifts, but using one of his gifts puts him in a perilous position politically.
Overall, I did not enjoy this novel, though the plot was more intricate than the previous novel in this series. I was happy to see more development of Anthony's relationship with Kaia, even though this novel is more focused on the romance between Sebastian and Jade. Surprisingly, my favorite aspect of the novel was Torin's truce. It unraveled much of Sebastian's character and history, and Torin's obnoxiousness balanced out the sweet aspects of the Sebastian/Jade romance.
But for all the excitement caused by the intriguing plot lines, I was dismayed by many things. Occasionally, the characters seem to act out of character, e.g., even if Sebastian and Kaia are no longer strangers, it is still weird that she "cozies" up to him in the beginning of the novel and that he sits watching television on the couch with his arm around her shoulders. She's dating Anthony, and Sebastian is not that affectionate with *anyone*. So it was just weird. There's no explanation early on to help the reader understand why Sebastian is acting so chummy with Kaia. If this were a human pair, there would be some major jealousy issues, so there was a missed opportunity to add depth to the shifter world, or at the very least, Anthony and Sebatian's friendship.
In another instance, it seemed that Sebastian is self-aware, and yet his actions are those of someone who has absolutely NO self-awareness. He is angry because other wolves don't treat him well, but what does it mean to be the Alpha? There's no background to explain to the reader what makes an alpha and how the rest of the pack is supposed to treat him, so there is no context to explain Sebastian's actions and thoughts.
There was also major repetitive narration of emotional thoughts. If the same feelings arise on a different day, they should be presented differently, maybe even point out that this character felt these feelings *again*, rather than simply repeating the same statement. Also, things are kept rather shallow, e.g., the reader doesn't ever learn more about Jade's hatred of her animal, other than her stalwart statements that she's a human being, NOT an animal. There were so many opportunities to delve into how she came to think the way she did – did something happen when she was a child? What do her parents think of her perspective? Has she even talked about it with them? There were many missed opportunities like this to make the emotional narration a deeper, more interesting exposition.
Consequently, the dense emotional narration mostly felt like I was listening to a pre-teen girl recount the drama of the day; the emotions and resulting thoughts of these characters were all over the place and didn't follow a logical growth progression. So the declarations of love in the end were surprising and not quite believable.
On a technical side, the novel needed a new set of eyes for another round of editing. The grammar errors were pervasive with misused subject/object pronouns (her instead of she), verb/object disagreement and misused words (accept, instead of except, etc.). The sentence structure swung erratically from simple, almost bullet type statements to wordy sentences that meandered around the meaning. I had to re-read many sentences several times to make sure I understood what the convoluted wording really meant.
So while the plot was intriguing and I began to care about what happens to the characters, there were just too many issues that kept me from even remotely enjoying it. If the novel went through another round of revision, I might recommend it to others.
**Review originally written for The Romance Review.com.
