Deina is trapped. As one of the Soul Severers serving the god Hades on earth, her future is tied to the task of shepherding the dying on from the mortal world – unless she can earn or steal enough to buy her way out.

Then the tyrant ruler Orpheus offers both fortune and freedom to whoever can retrieve his dead wife, Eurydice, from the Underworld. Deina jumps at the chance. But to win, she must enter an uneasy alliance with a group of fellow Severers she neither likes nor trusts.

So begins their perilous journey into the realm of Hades. . . The prize of freedom is before her – but what will it take to reach it?

Deina is one of the Soul Severers. Servants chosen by Hades to take both willing and unwilling souls to the underworld. This is her life for the next 40 years, unless she can work, or steal enough to pay off her life debt. So when Orpheus, the tyrant ruler, arrives offering her the chance at freedom, she jumps at it. But the task he requires is not an easy one. His wife, Eurydice, has died and he needs Severers to travel to the realm of the dead and bring her soul back to the land of the living. Deina, alongside a group of Severer’s she does not trust all embark on this dangerous mission, all with one thing on their mind… freedom. But soon they will all be asked what price they are willing to pay to gain it.

Daughter of Darkness was a story with a lot of promise and, as much as I enjoyed the authors descriptions and the journey our characters go on, I did feel like the characters themselves let the story down a little bit. Our MC Deina is great. Morally grey to the max, she is determined to end her indenture, no matter the cost, and she is willing to take down anyone in her way. She’s smart, fast and suspiciously skilled when it comes to the land of the dead. But she’s also just a girl who was ripped from her home before she ever got to know it, now tasked with something she never wished for. I enjoyed her character, her inner turmoil and demons, deciding if she could trust the others on the journey with her and seeing her learn things about herself as she takes the journey through the underworld.

The rest of our motley crew however, needed a significant amount of character development to get me to care for them in any way. They were all incredibly one dimensional, I think some of them were supposed to have redemption arc’s but their actions in the underworld, greatly under weighed their treatment of Deina in the living one. I think it was supposed to end up like a found family, but I just didn’t get emotionally invested in them at all, which was a shame because if we had got more development, the authors use of them would have had a much bigger impact on me as a reader.

The setting. You know me. I love anything mythology based, so I loved being thrown back to ancient Greece with Gods still in the forefront of people’s minds. The authors did a brilliant job of bringing both the living and dead versions of their world to life. They shows the perils of both brilliantly, that the living world can be just as dangerous as that of the dead. But I especially enjoyed following our characters on their journey through Hades realm to try and bring Eurydice back. They give us a deep dive into the mythology of the realm, the ruler, as well as the minor gods who call it their home. There were plenty of action scenes and their writing style’s really brought these to life, ensuring there were nail biting moments, alongside the ones that needed a bit more brain over brawn kind of energy.

There are plenty of plot twists thrown in, some that definitely have a larger emotional hit than others, and some that the authors did a great job of foreshadowing. All of these ensure that you fly through this story, even if, life me, you weren’t overly invested in the characters outcomes, and then it ends one a pretty big cliffhanger that has convinved me to give the second book a go. Overall this was an easy read that, although I was intrigued by the world and journey our characters went on, was let down by the lack of character development.