Casting Shadows | Review

RELEASE DATE: 12 January'21 

AUTHOR: Dziyana Taylor

SYNOPSIS: For two years, Rebecca Grimwood has been plagued by the same dream: an overturned ambulance vehicle, a long winding road, a motorcycle, and a man whose face she can’t make out. Dreams are just dreams, though, and she tries not to pay them much notice. Yet when a fortune teller tells Rebecca that her destiny involves a sacrifice, Rebecca seeks the answers she didn’t know she needed. To find them, she returns to the beginning: her old hometown of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.

 There’s always been something haunting about Harpers Ferry— maybe because it’s old Civil War ground or the fact that ever since arriving, Rebecca has started seeing things she can’t explain. Things lurking in the shadows, in the farthest corners of streets, their voices whispering. Things out to get her. But one night, when a man named Derek saves her from certain death, Rebecca can’t help but feel that some good can come from the shadows.

Casting Shadows by Dziyana Taylor is the first book in the Casting Shadows series and is set to be out on 12th January.

I give this book about 2 stars because I had to struggle to finish this book. The Writing style was tough to read.  It was filled with so many rhetoric devices that I felt like I was reading a book for school and not something I would read for fun per se. Almost half-way through the book, I had to return back because I felt like I missed stuff. All through-out the book, I was so confused that I almost gave up on it. 

The story progressed so slowly in the first half that it was borderline cringe. The early chapters are set during the Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg, where we meet our male protagonist who dies protecting a Diary. The rest of the book takes place from Becca's POV, who is an 18-year-old. She has had weird dreams for about 2 years, so she decided to go to a Fortune Teller and then decided to move in with her Grandma. She met Derek there as he saved her life.

If we talk about the relationships, that was a love triangle between Derek, Rebecca, and Nick. Nick is Rebecca's best friend from childhood who has feelings for her. Throughout the book, it's pretty clear she doesn't want Nick but still decides not to reject him properly and continue to lead him on, and in the end, when she did tell him, it was just a big mess. This part of the book also was pretty annoying that I had to skim all those para and not read it. It also may be a personal distress because I hate Love Triangles.

It would be a lie if I said I read the second half entirely because, after a point, I just wanted to be over with it. I skimmed through 40% of the book in the end. The ending of the book was a bit confusing too. Maybe if the writing style is changed a bit and made more comfortable to read, then the book could have been a good read, but with the current writing style, I had to put so much mental effort to understand even a few basic things like the background description. The book wasn't worth the struggle one puts in reading it.