THERE WILL COME A DARKNESS by KATY ROSE POOL
A REVIEW by ALEXA DUNCAN
I’m not going to lie to you, readers. There is one reason why I wanted to read There Will Come a Darkness by Katy Rose Pool. It’s because of a tweet. Before I show you the tweet, let me give you some background information. In 2020, an author by the name of LL McKinney (she wrote A Dream So Dark) decided to start a hashtag on Twitter showing the income disparities between white authors and authors of color. The concept was simple: Authors, post the amount of money your book sold for when it got its deal, also known as an advance. As more and more authors tweeted out their advances, one particular tweet stuck out to me for the sheer size of the number…
And that tweet would be Katy Rose Pool’s. She participated in #PublishingPaidMe with this tweet: https://twitter.com/katypool/status/1269382195765866497?lang=en
Yes, you’re reading that right. Katy Rose Pool was paid $333,000 PER BOOK for her debut trilogy, which includes There Will Come a Darkness. I was floored by this number. YA publishing is known for having huge advances, but as someone who literally makes a living knowing what’s going on in the industry, I couldn’t believe the size of this one. 333,000 dollars is huge for a debut YA author. Absolutely massive.
So, I decided to finally pick up the book. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. And honestly, dear readers? I was sorely disappointed. Now, I’d like to say that I think authors need to be paid for their work. It’s only fair and writing a novel is a huge time investment, as well as a ton of work. The size of an author’s advance is not always indicative of their talent, however, and that’s just the truth of things. Sometimes a publisher will extend an advance to an author on the grounds of how their work might do. Publishers like using crystal balls in this way.
So, along the way, Pool’s publisher must have thought There Will Come a Darkness would make a ton of money. A ton. The size of her advance reflects that.
Anyway, that’s enough yammering about The Biz. Onto the review:
There Will Come a Darkness is a multi-POV YA fantasy novel set in a Greco-Roman inspired world. We have five main characters and five points of view and it would take forever to describe them all, so I won’t. Because, dear readers, I didn’t finish this book. I found it, for lack of a better word, boring. This is not a dig at the author, of course, or the publisher who gave her a ton of money for this book. It simply wasn’t my cup of tea. There’s a lot in There Will Come a Darkness that is familiar to me as a long time SFF reader. There’s a prophecy, a lost prophet/prince, an assassin, a witty scoundrel, a dying girl, and some two-dimensional side characters.
I got 150 pages into this nearly-500 page tome before I decided to give up. None of the characters were interesting to me and the plot seemed very vague for how far I got into the story itself. Life is too short to read books you don’t enjoy, so I decided to put this one down. Your mileage may vary, however. You might love this book, and I won’t fault you if you do! You can pick up our copy of There Will Come a Darkness at the Oreana library today!