Night's Blaze Part 1 - Book Review

By Donna Grant

Firstly, let me point out that I downloaded Parts 1-4 via NetGalley. I hadn’t read a dragon-shifter story in a while and I was really drawn to the sound of this book, so much so that I was willing to ignore the fact that it was clearly a serial novella, which I’m not a fan of.

Now, as I mentioned, I found this on NetGalley and saw that it was a serial novella, so my rant is going to sound a little hypocritical.

Night’s Blaze is a 4 part serial novella, with each novella being released one week apart: Part 1 – March 10th; Part 2 – March 17th; Part 3 – March 24th; and Part 4 – March 31st. Keeping the releases so close together is smart as you won’t make fans angry by keeping them waiting too long for the next part to be released. However, going by Donna’s website, the full novel will also be released March 31st, the same day as the final part. Now considering each novella is costing $1.99 for less than 100 pages, and the entire book of less than 400 pages will cost $7.99, this smells like a rip-off to me. And then to release the entire book on the same day as the final part??? Why not just release the whole book and skip the novellas? How can any author or publisher claim it has nothing to do with making money? Or is it more about the number of NYT Best Sellers on their resumes?

Ok. Rant is over.

Overall, I would have given this book a 5 Heart rating because I thought it was well written. However, because of how this book is being released in parts, and then immediately in it’s entirety, it loses a heart. Sad, but true.

Being that this was Part 1, I assumed it was the beginning of a series, but there are so many characters and past events referenced in this one 68 page novella alone that you quickly realise you’ve come in part way through. Because of this, I’m not going to read parts 2-4 as I still won’t have a handle on the backstory, and starting from the beginning is just something I don’t have the inclination to do right now.