Janella Angeles is the Filipino American bestselling author of Where Dreams Descend. She got her start in writing through consuming glorious amounts of fanfiction at a young age—which eventually led to creating original stories of her own. She currently resides in Massachusetts, where she works in the business of publishing books on top of writing them, and is most likely to be found listening to musicals on repeat while daydreaming too much for her own good. You can find more of my reviews of Janella's works here.
The competition has come to a disastrous end, and Daron Demarco's fall from grace is front-page news. But little matters to him beyond Kallia, the contestant he fell for who is now missing and in the hands of a dangerous magician. Daron is willing to do whatever it takes to find her. Even if it means unearthing secrets that lead him on a treacherous journey, risking more than his life and with no promise of return. After falling through the mirror, Kallia has never felt more lost, mourning everything she left behind and the boy she can't seem to forget. Only Jack, the magician who has all the answers but can't be trusted, remains at her side. Together, they must navigate a dazzling world where mirrors show memories and illusions shadow every corner, ruled by a powerful showman who's been waiting for Kallia to finally cross his stage. But beneath the glamour of dueling headliners and never-ending revelry, a sinister force falls like night over everyone, with the dark promise of power beyond Kallia's wildest imagination—at a devastating cost. The truth will come out, a kingdom must fall, hearts will collide. And the show must finally come to an end.
The book community has recently made many points about morally gray characters, specifically female protagonists who are morally gray. Kallia from Where Dreams Descend and Amora from All the Tides of Fate are two of the greatest examples I would point to of books that have absolutely well-written and developed morally gray female leads. Kallia is ambitious, and doesn't much care about what happens to the people who get in her way, a characteristic that is made very clear in Where Dreams Descend. But now that's she's fallen into this strange other world with Jack, Kallia has to repurpose her ambition, and realize that she is no longer just driven by the desire to succeed, but by the desire to reunite with her friends again. Kallia is still the same person we grew to love in Where Dreams Descend—ambitious, certainly, but also bighearted and a badass and fighting to survive on her own—except now she is facing competitors she's not sure she can beat, all with a goal that seems completely impossible, forcing her to rewrite parts of her character to help achieve that goal. All in all, Kallia's character is extremely complicated—Angeles took care to make her nuanced, all with the end goal of portraying what's like to really be a female in the world.
The most brilliant thing that When Night Breaks does is function as a living text that tells us exactly what it was like to exist during the pandemic as a creator or artist. The entire story is a reflection of what this lived experience was like—the confusion, the alternate reality where the world is dark and you're just trying to figure out how to get home, the separation from loved ones, how it seems like a lot of the time there are no friendly faces and there is no hope, but how in the end you find both of those things in the strangest of places. I think that's what's really brilliant about this piece, and I don't believe we can divorce this story from the time period it was written in. Otherwise, we read all the spots of confusion and consider it, potentially, a drawback to the story or a flaw in editing, when rather it's a real, true reflection of what living in a world like Glorian and alternate-Glorian must be like—which we all know, because we all experienced it.
The craft of this novel is also rather extraordinary, when we break some of the elements down into parts. The alternating chapters in Demarco's and Kallia's points of view worked really well at the beginning to introduce us to their states of mind in the aftermath of Kallia's disappearance. This ended up pairing well later on as well, as they work to reunite. Pairing Kallia and Jack for most of the novel is wonderful. We don't get a lot of their interactions in Where Dreams Descend, and pairing them for When Night Breaks finally gives readers a chance to look at Kallia's past, understand Kallia's feelings regarding Jack, and to examine Jack's existence as well. We get a bit about the world of Soltair at the beginning, with the memory erasure and the role of the Patrons, however that fades into the distance quickly once Daron takes his trip into the woods—and while at first I was frustrated because I had wanted answers about the world of Soltair, I realized by the end that this did work to make commentary on what it is like to live in a world where you don't know the rules (much like what living in the middle of a global pandemic is like). Kallia and Daron both return to figures from their past (Jack and Eva/Lottie) to uncover what exactly is going on in this world in an interesting parallel that I'm glad Janella wrote into When Night Breaks. And, finally, my last favorite story element is how the first book was centered around setting the stage for the character dynamics (Jack is the bad guy, Kallia is ambitious, Daron just wants to know what the heck is going on) that get further expanded upon and further complicated in the second book, all with the end goal of uncovering the truth of existence and living and being with other people.
Janella has posted on social medias about how Hadestown, the musical, inspired some of her work with When Night Breaks. I had wanted to listen to the musical for some time, and decided to use tracking the themes/similarities in both as the perfect excuse. I listened to Hadestown a few times before sitting down with When Night Breaks and was fascinated with some of the elements that I found. Not only is the world below a dark alternate reality that reflects living in a pandemic-ridden world, but it's also it's own type of hell, or Hadestown, run by a mysterious god-like figure. We can equate Kallia and Demarco to Eurydice and Orpheus, and in doing so, Demarco's journey to get back to Kallia and their moments of reunion and deciding what to do next are made that much more complicated. One of the last images we're left with is when Kallia and Demarco are holding hands, which fans of the musical will see how that specific chapter is definitely a sort of commentary on the way Orpheus and Eurydice walked out of hell together. The language of the novel is clearly its own—Janella has such a way with words that I envy, her descriptions are so lush and vivid and missing just one sentence feels like a sin—but I also loved how I was able to track and note some of the ways other media played into her writing experience and the final story.
Hopefully this isn't the last we see of Janella Angeles! Until any more news is released for new projects, you can find more of my reviews of Janella's works here.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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