The Whispering Dark: The bewitching academic rivals to lovers slow burn debut fantasy

Product Information

Kelly Andrew’s debut opens with a dedication that reads: ‘For anyone who knows what it is to feel alone in a crowd, or to draw solace from daydreams. Fortunately, there appeared to be no one else in the vicinity, only Delaney Meyers-Petrov and endless dazzling white. Real heartbreak is when you get an ARC of your most anticipated debut of the year (and it’s your 2nd ever ARC, too! That’s the only lesson we are a part of – we know they learn Latin and calculus (for some reason), but this is the last time anything that is taught at the Uni is referenced until they have a test to see if they can walk through to another world.

I do think this is a me problem though, so I encourage everyone to pick up this book and see what they think re: the two main characters. The author claims this book is a slow-burn, but their instant connection and the fact that they’re immediately drawn to each other begs to differ.All the locals had been warned about the whispering, and knew better than to step out of the rainforest trail to follow it. They’re both intriguing characters in their own right, but together their fractious dynamic is magnetic. The Whispering Dark is one of those books that simultaneously creeps up on you and nettles its way under your skin and hooks you from the very beginning. The needs-based fellowship came with a single caveat: They’d pay her tuition in full, so long as she agreed to go wherever she was placed. She’d slipped away in a hospital bed, lights winking and machinery humming, and resurfaced from the cataleptic dark to find her ears no longer worked.

But Colton has secrets, and the more Delaney discovers (and hears whispered from the shadows), the more it threatens to tear their forbidden partnership – and the world – apart. The water’s too cold for swimming,” she said, as if he were flailing in the muck of his own volition. There’s a lot of lived-in experience that feels present within the narrative and it really opened my eyes to certain aspects that I had not thought of before. The first day of the exam, she and three hundred other hopefuls spent the morning locked in the echoing chamber of a public high school gymnasium.This book has a special place in my heart for the way I can relate to and felt connected to her, be it her desire for academic achievement, feeling overwhelmed/imposter syndrome, not being able to voice her own needs and boundaries for fear it would make others uncomfortable, and then to see her shed that version of herself and become the person she is at the end (and tbh the one shes always been, she just didn't know it at the start) was v cathartic. and 2) the 1st time we see said roommate we don’t even get an introduction – she is just thrown into the story! The initial narrative is somewhat of a slow burn with indeterminate mentions of past events and secrets via the two-story timelines.