Below

Below is the story of Hokk and Elia. Hokk is an outcast from Below, a dark stormy plain, and Elia is a laundress from Above, where its sunny and beautiful but the lower and upper class differences are great. Hokk and Elia get throw together when Elia falls from Above and must hide from the guards on their flying mounts with Hokk's help. Hokk hopes to use Elia to end his banishment. Nothing goes as planned for Hokk and Elia as they travel across the plains to Hokk's city and avoiding the guards from Above.
It took me a few chapters to really wrap my head around the Above and the Below places. Above floats in the air on a giant mountain of a rock and Below is shrouded in clouds that keep Above afloat. I really hope during the series we find out about how this situation happened. It seems to take place far in the future of Earth. Once I got ahold of how the world works, the story was quite enjoyable. A few times I got annoyed with the characters' choices, but both are young and a bit immature so their choices made sense. And I like that Above seems to be slowly dropping from the sky causing problems for everyone, and that catastrophe that seems to be coming is something I look forward to storywise.
I received this book for review at Edelweiss.

Darkness Fair: Book Two in the Dark Cycle Series

Darkness Fair picks up shortly after Darkness Brutal left off. Aiden is trying to figure out his new powers, Ava is still stuck between the living and the dead, and Rebecca doesn't really know where she stands in the world.
The Dark Cycle Series definitely falls in the young adult fantasy category however the themes and dark themes and feel are much more adult than what I've normally read for young adult. Each character has been beaten down or broken for some reason in their life but they are still trying to save the world from the oncoming darkness.
The first time I started reading book one, Darkness Brutal, I didn't get pulled in right away. I had to put it aside for a month or two then I decided to give it another go. That's when I got sucked in and read the whole book in one day. I was pretty excited to see book two was available and I got sucked in quickly. So many dark fantasies dealing with angels and demons don't really show how good and evil people and the supernatural can be. In theory they are evil but they don't do anything too brutal or savage. The evil is usually more grand scheme. In this series there is the normal grand scheme evil but it also gets down and dirty with blood and gore and death. This is definitely not a normal young adult dark fantasy, but I really enjoyed the story and had trouble putting it down. It really shows that good doesn't always automatically win, and there are many young kids and adults who have really had it bad growing up and they are just doing the best they can do not only live but also survive.
I really recommend this series to anyone who enjoys dark contemporary fantasy. It feels like a rated R version of Supernatural at times.

I received this book for review at NetGalley.