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Kiersten White

And I Darken (The Conqueror’s Trilogy) Paperback – 31 August 2016

by Kiersten White (Author)

370 ratings

No one expects a princess to be bruta? And Lada Dragwyla likes it that way. Ever since she and her brother were abandoned by their father to be raised in the Ottoman sultan’s courts, Lada has known that ruthlessness is the key to survival. For the lineage that makes her and her brother special also makes them targets.
Lada hones her skills as a warrior as she nurtures plans to wreak revenge on the empire that holds her captive. Then she and Radu meet the sultan’s son, Mehmed and everything changes. Now Mehmed unwittingly stands between Lada and Radu as they transform from siblings to rivals and the ties of love and loyalty that bind them together are stretched to breaking point.
The first of an epic new trilogy starring the ultimate anti-princess who does not have a gentle heart. Lada know show to wield a sword and she'll stop at nothing to keep herself and her brother alive.

Reading age

12 - 16 years
Print length

496 pages
Language

English
Dimensions

12.9 x 3.1 x 19.8 cm
Publisher

Random House UK
Publication date

31 August 2016
ISBN-10

0552573744
ISBN-13

978-0552573740
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Product description

Review

A dark, gritty, and seriously badass epic that will have you dying for more . . . required reading for every feminist fantasy fan ― Buzzfeed

Epic and intense . . . fans of dark history [will be] hooked from the outset. Think Game of Thrones transported to the Ottoman Empire ― Lovereading4kids.co.uk

It's delicious ― bustle.com

Fierce and dark . . . A superb offering ― theyoungfolks.com

Lada – so ugly and mean that readers will adore her – stubbornly rejects gender roles . . . and the characters . . . benefit from complex motivations and an unconventional love triangle. Addictive intrigue ― Kirkus

About the Author

KIERSTEN WHITE is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous novels for teens. She lives with her family near the ocean in San Diego, which, in spite of its perfection, spurs her to dream of faraway places and even further away times.

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Product details

Publisher : Random House UK (31 August 2016)
Language : English
Paperback : 496 pages
ISBN-10 : 0552573744
ISBN-13 : 978-0552573740
Reading age : 12 - 16 years
Item Weight : 280 g
Dimensions : 12.9 x 3.1 x 19.8 cm

Best Sellers Rank: #171,776 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,080 in Children's Science Fiction (Books)
- #5,036 in Children's Fantasy (Books)
- #5,794 in Children's Action & Adventure

Customer Reviews:
370 ratings

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Customer reviews

5 star		67%
4 star		18%
3 star		9%
2 star		3%
1 star		3%

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Elena

Engrossing.Well written.Magnificent.

Reviewed in India on 8 October 2017

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First of all let me clear the misconception about this book being a fantasy because it is not one.This book is rather a historical fiction.I dislike when a book is projected as one thing and turns out to be another but fortunately I already knew about that before diving into it.Nonetheless it an amazing book.The writing is beautiful and there is no magic in this book but the writing is magical.The characters oh!the characters ,I loved all the characters from the badass Lada to the sweet Radu to the charming Mehmed.The side characters were well written too.The character development was phenomenal.The book is highly addicting and I highly recommend it.

2 people found this helpful

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Hari

Good

Reviewed in India on 19 April 2017

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I came across mixed reviews for this one and decided to give it a try,it wasn't dark as explained by many people,it does not have sudden plot changes you can see them coming.It was a compelling read,the writing style was good but didn't meet my expectations.

One person found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Good surprise!!!

Reviewed in India on 28 October 2020

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When you look for something but you got something else and you are happy with what you got.
Okay writter writes so many characters and so long saga saught of I wanna know how she manages to do so. Write so long all character put story in a exact place....good different read. Loved it

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srinidhi

:)))

Reviewed in India on 18 February 2019

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I love. Love. Love. This book. I live the language and the emotions and the ottoman empire and everything

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Amazon Customer

A pleasant surprise

Reviewed in India on 20 July 2017

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This book was my first high fantasy novel of the month and I must say, this was well worth my time. If you're looking for anything epic fantasy related to read, this might be the one for you!

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Amazon Customer

Two Stars

Reviewed in India on 1 April 2017

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Was a chore trying to get through this one...definitely not continuing this series

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Dev Saini

Brilliant book. Well written

Reviewed in India on 7 April 2017

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Brilliant book. Well written, although the sexy times that Mehmed and Lada had were a bit too heated (not in terms of being explicit, but just an over exaggeration of feelings/emotions which I found annoying and kind of dramatic). The characters are really unique and diverse, and there are loads of good secondary characters. This book made my heart race with anticipation in some parts, which is a feeling I haven't felt in a while.
The quality of the book was more or less good, though I find Flipkart preferable to Amazon in terms of product packaging and overall quality.

I can't wait to read the next book.

2 people found this helpful

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Loco Poco

This book is literary crack it's that addictive

Reviewed in India on 25 October 2017

Who knew alternate history could work this well with YA?
Kiersten White picked up the greatest Ottoman war-mongering adventurer and alleged tyrant Mehmed the Conqueror, the cruel Vlad the Impaler (this dude inspired Dracula's character) and his just and little known brother Radu, a rich Ottoman culture, and weaved a personal and engaging YA fiction around it.
Young Mehmed is an emotionally struggling boy with no future and no respect. But we know this is the boy who would grow up and at the ridiculously young age of 21, end up swallowing kingdoms with formidable god-like status: Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire.

And when we meet Ladislav, it takes only a little while to guess this is Vlad the Impaler in the making. Only in this alternate version of history, she is a girl, which makes this story far more interesting than it would have been had he been a boy.
Radu, however, is the most complex and politically shrewd character.
Kiersten White threads history with fiction and a complex romantic triangle so well together that at the end, history buffs and literary critics wouldn't much care about the flaws in the book and dive deeper and finish it through and end up craving for more.

One person found this helpful

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Clive Butterfield

An unusual yet captivating series of characters. Great story.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 October 2017

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An unusual story. Lada the heroine is not pleasant in her demeanor nor is she pleasant in appearance. As a child she is brutal to everyone but in turn is treated brutally by her father the prince, whom she aspires to be respected by. She has a mean older step brother and soft and plyable younger brother who she protects and threatens in turn. They are sent as hostages to the Ottoman Empire to ensure their father keeps to treaty terms. They are adopted as a source of unusual amusement by the Sultan's youngest son, who in all likelihood will never receive the throne. OK that is a terribly dry description of the plot line. In truth the book is about a complicated tryst between the three children who grow up together and form what becomes a powerful alliance. They have each other, they have a place and in Lada we have a deeply disturbed and yet wonderfully described kick ass female character. I cannot even begin to guess where she will take us in the sequel book.
I thought this was a well written book, a complicated plot explained well. However, particularly at it's beginning and less so towards it's climax the story didn't 'flow'. It was more like reading a series of diary entrances rather than a plot. Incidents were described without the dots being particularly joined. I was pleased to note this diminished and ceased altogether as the book progressed. Almost as though the author planned to use all these incidents to establish the rationale of the major characters but wasn't quite sure how to paste over the gaps between highlights, so decided not to bother and rushed onward toward the meet of the story. Did it matter? Hell no a great book was born. Can I ignore it? Well obviously personally I can't hence 4/5 stars,

One person found this helpful

Vic James

Radu’s reluctant and all-consuming love for Mehmed

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 18 September 2016

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THAT cover + THAT premise (genderswapped Vlad the Impaler) = my personal definition of irresistible. I didn't even need to read the blurb, I was that desperate to get my hands on it

Vlad is now Lada, the bold, ugly, daughter of the shifty voivode of Wallachia. This book (first in a trilogy) takes Lada and her little brother Radu – to whom history gave a kinder reputation and the nickname ‘the Handsome’ – from childhood in Sighisoara and Tirgoviste, to adolescence as political hostages in the Ottoman court, where they grow up alongside one of the Ottoman sultan’s sons, Mehmed.

White has written a fabulous political thriller, with a side-helping of YA love-triangle served up absolutely fresh: Lada’s growing and suppressed attraction to Mehmed, his arrogant yet sincere affection for her, and breaking my heart all over the page, Radu’s reluctant and all-consuming love for Mehmed.

It’s a gripping tale, and White doesn’t shirk the detail and intricacies of court and military life. The story propels you along – you pause only to admire delicious turns of phrase. When an ally is shot during an ambush, the victim ‘looked up at Radu, a half smile on his face as though the arrow were the end of the joke he had been in the middle of telling. And then he fell off his horse, tangling under the wheels of the supply wagon behind them.’

The book holds many more rewards, not least a wonderfully nuanced depiction of Islam, and a gorgeous little F/F romance glowingly illuminated in the margins. White brings to life not simply her protagonists, but their whole milieu. I loved Lada, Mehmet, Kumal and Nazira – and especially Radu – and can’t wait for the second in this series.

4 people found this helpful

Aleksander Cristea

Fantastic retelling, great characters!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 August 2016

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All it took for me to become interested in And I Darken by Kiersten White was the fact that it was a retelling of Vlad the Impaler but with a girl being centre stage as the Impaler whilst her brother was the softer one. Now I’ll be honest in saying I expected at least some elements of supernatural from this, probably because my brain can’t detach Vlad from his supernatural counterpart: Dracula. And I Darken has no such supernatural elements and is a historical retelling of the story.
It was also bloody brilliant and definitely would make me consider reading more YA historical fiction.
Lada and her brother Radu are the children of Dracul, head of Wallachia. They’ve lived all their young lives there, Lada doing everything she could to get her father’s approval and Radu doing what he could to stay out of the way of his bully of an older brother. But one day their father travels with them to meet the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire before proceeding to leave his children hostage there, to be raised in the foreign court. During their stay, they become friends with the Sultan’s son Mehmed and make friends with the Janissaries, the soldiers conscripted from a young age from all over the empire.
Roughly the first third of the book takes place when they are all around the ages of ten to thirteen. I loved the book already by that point but some of those bits had me sitting there clinging to the book in terror of what might happen as these children were thrust into situations they seemed far too young to handle. But already it was impossible not to love Lada: not blessed with her mother’s pretty face, Lada makes me for what others see as lacking in sheer spirit and viciousness. And yet, despite how infuriating she can be—especially later on—I adored Lada. She is brave and unrelenting and uncompromising and so very strong. Meanwhile Radu is her softer counterpart, intelligent and quiet, he observes and learns to manoeuvre the court of their enemy with the efficiency his sister moves around a battlefield.
The story is mostly one of political intrigue and romance with both Radu and Lada gravitating around Mehmed and learning to reconciliate—or not—their feelings for each other, the Sultan’s son, Islam, and the country they were forced to live in by their father. And I Darken is a story with heart. Each character is exquisitely crafted with all the contradictions that humans are made of, and become tangled in each other’s desires and needs.
I loved the book from the start, there was something about how real everything felt, how much I could connect with the land and characters described that really whisked me away and into the story. But I truly fell in love with this story about a third of the way through, when we skip a few years to re-join Lada, Radu, and Mehmed when they’re older teens. That’s when the political intrigue also really kicks in and oh boy those were my favourite parts.
White writes beautifully, capturing the essence of the time and places she describes, building characters in a few strokes of words so that everyone we so much as encounter at a glance has a story behind them. It is hard not to fall in love with the places she presents us in the book, all so alive with history and people.
What meant most for me in And I Darken was the fact that Radu is gay. He is also one of the two main characters. And neither if he the only LGBTQ+ character in the pages of this book. There are other gay and lesbian characters that move around him. His storyline is both beautiful and heart breaking and was also very close to my heart.
Warning: minor spoiler ahead but I have to gush about that scene.
There is this one moment in which Radu sees his sister kissing Mehmed and that’s the cinching moment where he realises he is gay, something he hadn’t fully understood until that point, and was a little frightened of. The scene is from his point of view, that turning moment when his world turns upside down and he realises that he cannot have the man he loves. It is, for me, one of the most poignant scenes in the entire book. Why? Because I have been there. I, too, wasn’t exactly sure I was gay until the guy I happened to like at the time came back to where we were rooming together to tell me he’d kissed a girl who was a mutual friend whilst on the tube with her. The emotions White writes for Radu may as well have been mine on that day. It was so very powerful to find this in a book, to feel so strangely comforted in that my experience was not a lone thing.
Spoiler over.
I love that White included LGBT+ characters in her work even though we are very much in a historical setting with no supernatural elements. It was nice to see someone recognise that we have always been there, no matter how much people have tried to erase us out of history.
And I Darken is a book I want to recommend to everyone. Even if you don’t read historical fiction, even if you usually, like me, favour things with magic and dragons and vampires, you should read this book. This story didn’t magic and vampires because the characters that inhabit it are too wonderful, too deep and interesting not to fall in love with. I adored Lada, but I must admit to be more than a little in love with sweet, lovely Radu.
5/5

Tales of a Librarian

Great concept, execution was too slow for me

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 July 2016

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Arc copy provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I am deeply ambivalent about this book. I personally give it 3 stars because it really didn't take me a month to read - I just found it really easy to put down, sometimes for days at a time. On the other hand I acknowledge that for concept, execution, voice, structure, characterization it deserves 4.5 stars.

I didn't like any of the characters but I still rooted for them. I cared what happened to them. It was a really original idea to make 'Vlad' a girl, 'Lada' instead. Working in the twisted love triangle with no right answers and no happy ending in a backdrop of political intrigue and deceit was a stroke of genius. But it was incredibly slow paced. Maybe I picked this up at the wrong time - it never pretends to be anything other than a politically, character driven alternate history. However for every page that really gripped me there were ten following pages of 'meh'.

I love the idea and the writing is flawless but this isn't a book I would re-read. Hats off to Keirsten White though, this has to be the most original and emotionally complicated book I've read this year.

One person found this helpful

Sophie Barron-West

Deliciously dark and heartbreaking in the best possible

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 March 2019

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I went into this book with no expectation, but I was blown away.
This story is not fast paced, but boy does it take you on a journey. The character development is exquisitely executed, leaving you with a real understanding of the complexities behind each characters decisions and motivations. The plot, whilst based on the historical accounts of Vlad the Impaler, has many twists and turns that will leave you wanting more.
I savoured this book but the resorted to greedily devouring the second instalment in the trilogy, because it leaves to you so invested in the characters. Highly recommend.

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