Chapter by Chapter

I’ve gotta say that I’ve been pretty hyped to readDark Metropolis by author Jaclyn Dolamore ever since I first saw the cover on Goodreads. It was beyond beautiful and instantly caught my attention. Why is there a flapper girl on the cover? What’s with the Human Centipede-esque person silhouette? What is going on? Fortunately all of those questions are answered by the time I finished reading the novel.

In Dark Metropolis Thea Holder is a sixteen year old girl who can barely keep the world she’s grown up with intact. Since her father’s death her mother has been anything but sane and her job as a waitress at the notorious Telephone Club has begun to grow stressful. Why? Because girls from her workplace have begun to go missing and it’s only a matter of time before another one of her co-workers joins their numbers.

 It isn’t until she meets young, mysterious and handsome Freddy that she becomes caught up in something much larger than herself. Together Thea and Freddy will discover the secrets behind Freddy’s powers, the dark underworld hidden in the City, and the mystery clouding Thea’s Father’s death. That is if they aren’t stopped first…

What caught my interest first with Dark Metropolis was the writing style. Jaclyn Dolamore has a very unique way of writing and it’s one that fits the novel perfectly. The narrative is ominous and gives it a dark feel no matter how light the scenes may appear. There’s always that impending sense that something is going to go wrong and that nobody in the novel is safe (which isn’t a wrong assumption). The novel does a wonderful job of keeping readers interested and on the edge of their seats, wondering about all the possible things that might happen next.

The world that Dark Metropolis is set in is also one that I’ve never read before. It’s set in that Great Gatsby era but is in an alternate world where magic is real, known and common and very illegal under certain circumstances. There was some world-building missing from the novel that I wasn’t very pleased with. I was left with a lot of unanswered questions and found a few plot holes. Hopefully these will be answered in book two and I’m very interested in seeing how the story will progress.

That being said the plot of the novel is—like most things in Dark Metropolis—very mysterious. You don’t know exactly what’s going on until the very end of the novel. You don’t know who’s good, who’s evil and who’s somewhere in the middle. I have to say that Dark Metropolis did a great job of being unpredictable in most situations and I’m so glad for that.

The novel’s main characters are Thea and Freddy. Both of them are total opposites in some senses and totally the same in others. They go well together. Especially since their characters interact in the majority of the scenes in the novel. All of their scenes together and conversations worked. There was nothing flawed or wrong of whatever with these two protagonists. I love them to bits.However it felt like a major portion of the novel (a third of it maybe?) was all about a secondary character who felt unnecessary to see so much of.

I would recommend Dark Metropolis to readers who are fans of urban fantasy and to any readers who are looking for a novel that will keep them on their toes. Any readers who are looking for a novel that has a romance element that doesn’t overpower the plot should also try giving Dark Metropolis a look. This is the kind of novel that you could easily finish in one sitting.