When Anna Kamoria was attending her North Carolina high school, she also trained in sword fighting and martial arts with her mother Adelyna’s “handsome, stoic” friend Derrick, and she felt different from her classmates “in a way that made it hard to relate to others.” One night, her mother was murdered by unknown assailants and Anna disappeared, only to be found back at her former home a year later, with no memory of the lost time. She moved in with family friends and spent the next two years recovering, faking and bullying her way through mandatory psychotherapy and earning her GED. Now, she’s still unable to come to terms with strange memories that she considers “trauma-induced hallucinations.” Anna revisits the murder scene on her 20th birthday, and Derrick reappears there, explaining that it’s time for Anna to learn about Nightfall, which her mother “forbade me from telling you about”; he calls it “a place for learning.” A wax-sealed letter arrives and invites Anna for an extended Nightfall stay; soon, Anna drinks a nightshade concoction and is whisked away to her new home. Organized survival challenges await, as well as camaraderie and sexy rivalry among Nightfall’s other recruits. Late-night, clandestine rendezvous offer opportunities for forbidden love triangles and information-gathering. Cliques emerge among students who affiliate with longstanding pegasus, dragon, and ravengroups. Ravenwood’s novel follows the winning formula of romantasy series-starters such as Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing (2023), with a dash of Holly Black’s The Cruel Prince (2018).Although its content warnings are fair, the book doesn’t go as far as horror-adjacent dark romantasies such as Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House (2019).Anna is a somewhat bland protagonist, though, in part because she recalls so little of importance in her life, beyond her amnesia and amnesia-related events. Anna does begin to thrive, however, as she pursues new memories and relationships at Nightfall, and greater challenges, and character growth, hopefully await her in future installments.