Luceat Lux Vestra

Release Date: August 15th, 2013 and August 14th, 2014 from the Penguin Group

Summaries from Goodreads: 

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Between the Spark and the Burn

So I decided to put the two books together since I read them back-to-back. In all honesty, I did not like this duology as I hoped I would. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea was the first debut novel from Tucholke, and I wasn't surprised to see mistakes within the writing and the overall layout of the plot line. I decided to give the author another chance and read Between the Spark and Burn, and sadly I was disappointed. The sequel did not do justice. 

Whenever I write a review that has a poor rating, I always like to start it off with the things that I liked versus starting with the dislikes. With the Between duology though, I wasn't able to find anything that I liked at all. What I disliked the most was the writing style and diction used. It was unappealing to say the least. The imagery was skewed and the language and diction of each character was overall annoying to the point where I wanted to stop reading to duology all together.

As for the love in this story...there was instalove. That is one of my biggest pet peeves. I can understand that there was actually something deeper in the plot that caused the instalove to occur, but that doesn't excuse it at all. There was even instalove in the sequel that was totally out-of-the-blue-and-in-your-face. Just....ugh.

The ending for Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea seemed almost random. I feel like I have either seen or read that ending somewhere before and it all just didn't feel original to me at all, and that was very disappointing. For Between the Spark and the Burn, I will admit that the ending was better than the first. Even though the story was just as predictable, there were more seemingly random events popping up wherever they could possible go to make the story feel more "put together". That aspect really brought the sequel down to the rating of the first. 

Overall, the Duology earns only 1.5/5 stars based on the principle that it was poorly written and executed. I had high hopes for these books, especially the sequel, and unfortunately I was let down. If you find the story interesting then read it, but you may or may not be disappointed at the end of it all.