Antonia Bernardin

The 34th book I read this year was The Light That Blinds Us by Anthony Theo Darcy.

This is his debut novel, Anthony is a booktoker who I’ve followed forever, what started out as ‘book boyfriend’ skits, turned into an idea for a book that his follower’s encouraged him to write, which turned into the book being picked up for publishing! Not to be biased as someone who has followed his account for the whole of the journey but dude put in the work and I’m so happy for him (to be clear, I do not know him, I’m just a book nerd who spends too much time on tiktok).

An attempt at summarising

Alexis was haunted most of his childhood by the ‘shadow man’, a terrifying hallucination that whispered to him telling him to do horrible things. Despite all the therapists and drugs, it never really went away until the day he met his best friend, who also happens to carry an amulet just like his, except his is blue and hers is green. Even though he’s still haunted by the same nightmare that wakes him up at dawn, Alexis is relatively happy, until the day he takes a school trip and the bus breaks down besides Stonehenge. Alexis and his friend find themselves drawn to the ancient stone, where the come across two more teens wearing amulets just like theirs.

When their amulets are suddenly drawn to the heart of Stonehenge, the group find themselves thrust into the underground world of the ‘Elementals’, people who posses powers over different elements and use them to guard the world from the shadows and the ancient monsters born from it. The enigmatic leader of the place they discover beneath Stonehenge informs them that they are part of a prophecy, four people who can wield the four core elements, earth, wind, water and fire. They are prophesied to retrieve the original elemental gems, from which their amulets were taken, to gain the enormous power of the four original elements who first drove back the shadows, in order to help drive them back once again. But Alexis soon discovers that he has ties to the terrible man leading the side of the shadows, beyond the shadows of his nightmares and that the darkness which haunted him his whole life might be more a part of him than even he knew.

My thoughts

This book was such a good read, I haven’t read something so properly classic fantasy in a long time! The summary ‘Legendborn meets Percy Jackson’ is pretty apt, it has legends and prophecies, it’s interwoven with mythology from all over the world and it has a proper ‘training their powers’ school vibes. There’s even a little bit of slow burn, friends to lovers romance thrown in but really it’s about found family too.

It was perhaps a little more YA’y than I tend to read, which lead to some phrases that weren’t for me, such as referring to the group of them as teens or elementals, quite repetitively.

However, there were genuinely no downsides to the book besides that. I think it’s a really good first book and I hope we get the rest of the series!