Black City by Elizabeth Richards

Black City by Elizabeth Richards

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I really enjoyed reading Black City. It was definitely dark and haunting, but at the same time I felt Natalie and Ash both had an underlying innocence about them. Hmm. How to better explain that? Okay, here goes. Ash and Natalie are both jaded and bitter about the society in which they are living, and yet Richards is able to blend this with their youth bringing more reality to these fantasy characters. They are both distrustful and naive, wanting to see the best in a situation even as they expect the worst. They really, truly are typical teens living in an atypical world.
Just as in the synopsis, Ash and Natalie, two polar opposites, meet and not instantly, but eventually fall in love. (gotta love that sentence, eh?) This is a story about prejudice and segregation and the dark side of human ambition. The shunned party is a race of supernatural beings known as darklings. I would say these are most closely related to vampires in modern pop culture than anything else. The darklings secrete a toxin with their bite that puts the victim in an euphoric haze, hence the name of the toxin is Haze. Humans become addicted to Haze and are called hazzers. Because of this addiction and the resulting amount of human deaths due to Haze, there is a war between humans and darklings led by an ambitious politician called The Purian Rose who basically declares himself the political and religious leader of the United Sentry States. Results of the war include very strict laws about darklings and segregation of darklings from the human population by a sectioning off of territory by a wall. Of course with every cause there is a group of rebel extremists with an agenda, and crazy Purian supporters that become deluded and psychotic.
Ash is a darkling allowed to live on the human side of the wall because he is half human himself. (If this review seems a little heavy to you, it's purely because this is a heavy book.) His resulting physiology being that he has a heart, but it doesn't beat. He suffers from an I'm so different I can't possibly fit in anywhere syndrome. Natalie seems to have a different problem in that she fits in being an Emissary's daughter, but is sickly due to having been born with a bad heart and having a transplant at a young age. I won't go any farther into that explanation for fear of giving too much away, but if you like the whole concept I've set out, definitely pick up this book.
So yes, this book is deeply detailed and very heavy with politics, but it is refreshingly served with a side of first love.



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