I know C.S. Pascat from the Fence comics, a lighter queer romance set in a boys school fencing team. This is no that, mostly. Dark Rise is a chosen one story in which there is a secret organization fighting a secret battle to stop the great evil of the past from coming back. This is a standard fantasy scenario; what keeps things interesting is that no one with one or two exceptions is exactly who they think or say at the beginning. Will needs to find whoever murdered his mother and it turns out she may have been connected to the Stewards who are the guardians of the old knowledge and will fight to prevent the Dark King from rising again at the side of the Blood of the Lady (descendants of the woman who killed the Dark King the first time). Violet wants to be like her brother Tom who is a Lion, a person with more strength than normal, and has just sworn loyalty to Simon, Lord Crenshaw, who may be involved in reviving the Dark King. Elizabeth is engaged to marry Simon, but might not be aware of all this, and Justice is a Steward who takes in Will and Violet, and gets them introduced to Stewards training, all the while searching for his missing partner Marcus. James just pops in now and again, and he’s supposedly a reincarnation of the Dark King’s top person, but James has little function in the story except to be a theoretically really dangerous tool of Simon’s. He and Will seem to have some odd connection, or maybe attraction….
There is a lot of room for betrayal, but that’s actually not as big a factor as you’d think. There’s a lot of personal struggle though, for example as Violet has to figure out which side she wants to serve as a Lion. Will has to figure out his place in all of this, since his mother might have been Blood of the Lady, and he feels he’s got hidden powers but can’t get them to work. Thankfully, the angst actually works out most of the time in that it enables character growth or least growing self-knowledge.
There are some fights, but more planning and figuring out, and oddly this works. The character driven nature of a lot of the story makes it pretty readable even when there’s no real fighting. There is some random stuff that does not really seem to fit, like the reveal about the last surviving unicorn (I think it’s one of the last ones, definitely a unicorn though). Will’s final face off with Simon is also rather anti-climactic since Will suddenly seems to know how and where to get to Simon, and the actual fight is pretty minor. Thing is, because of what else is also going on at the same time, both personal and action, it’s actually fine. Simon always was a villain and that doesn’t change (I’m kind of glad there since the villain with a tragic sympathetic backstory trope bugs me), but it turns out he may not have been the biggest threat, and Will’s starting to figure out who/what that is, but the big question at the end is, who else might know? Supposedly, we start to find that out sometimes later this year.
