Review: Beasts Made Of Night

Beasts Made of Night
Rating: 3/5
Buy or Borrow: Borrow
Source: Copy courtesy of the publisher! 

In the walled city of Kos, corrupt mages can magically call forth sin from a sinner in the form of sin-beasts – lethal creatures spawned from feelings of guilt. 

Taj is the most talented of the aki, young sin-eaters indentured by the mages to slay the sin-beasts. But Taj’s livelihood comes at a terrible cost. When he kills a sin-beast, a tattoo of the beast appears on his skin while the guilt of committing the sin appears on his mind. Most aki are driven mad by the process, but 17-year-old Taj is cocky and desperate to provide for his family. 

When Taj is called to eat a sin of a royal, he’s suddenly thrust into the center of a dark conspiracy to destroy Kos. Now Taj must fight to save the princess that he loves – and his own life. 

Okay, so, this is a tricky review for me to write, because I wanted to love this book so much. It's Nigerian influenced and I haven't come across that in a YA fantasy before, so the book had a really unique and original feel to me! Although the talk of auto-mail limbs had me thinking of Fullmetal Alchemist almost immediately and so my brain started to picture that! 

Beasts Made of Night has a truly intriguing world and mythology. I wanted to know more about it, the ink monsters being swallowed and turning in to tattoos on Taj where fascinating and I loved the idea behind it. I also found the world, while being a fantasy world, to have very realistic issues present in it. Poverty, the poor being exploited, corruption and prejudice against the aki where all very real issues. There are some truly brilliant elements to this story, and I was rooting for this book to be brilliant. 

Unfortunately I struggled with this book in a few places. I actually wanted to DNF it at one point but I decided to push on because I was hoping it would pick up. I found myself checking out a couple of times as I was reading, and not being able to focus because the writing didn't draw me in. It was kind of average and just really didn't suck me in like I was waiting for. I actually ended up skim reading towards the end. I wasn't a fan of the pace either, I found the book a bit hard to get in to, I thought it was slow and there wasn't much plot until about half way through the book, which I thought was too late in the book to really get in to. I just wasn't as drawn in to it as I was hoping to be.