I received this book through the Early readers program in exchange for an honest review.

I had not read/listen to the previous books in the series. I felt like it was hard to follow the book and keep up with all that was happening. The characters were not engaging and the story had too many plots. Maybe I will go back and read the previous books to see if this one makes more sense. ( )

I received this book through the Early readers program. I thought at first this was another of the YA supernatural books so prevalent these days but I found myself about halfway through it hoping it wasn't for the YA crowd as it has a pretty graphic sex scene about the halfway mark.
This book seemed to want to be too many things at once, Action book, supernatural book, horror novel, romance book that it doesn't take the time to be any one genre long enough. I was disappointed at the number of characters/species the author tried to cram into one book so that it became a chore just figuring out who was who. And the story line was hard to follow as we first try to rescue this person than that person.
I always try to find something I like about a book and some of the characters were amusing, the humor was funny here and there but there was just too much going on to keep it all straight.
Vampires, Nephilim, pixies, werewolves, archangels, demons, humans and senors, Witches, you name them they are thrown in somewhere.
It might have helped if I had read the other 6 books that make up this series, but somehow I doubt it. I like a good Horror story, action adventure, but this is not one.
And the graphic sex scene was just gratuitous and unnecessary.
Though it doesn't bear on the story I also had trouble with the format. I've grown to enjoy audio books on cds but these were MP3 coded cds making them impossible to play on just any cd player, I had to download to my PC and then copy to my MP3 player, a time consuming and completely unnecessary step.
Oh, and don't let me forget that the story switches perspective back and forth every other chapter, from Lucas told in third person to Melena told in first person, another confusing thing.
Sorry, but I didn't enjoy this book. ( )

I had received this audiobook from librarything.com in turn for an honest review.

I had not read any of the other books in this series before listening to this book. So I wasn't sure of a few things when the book had first started out. I didn't know the characters backgrounds and such, but that didn't make a difference for me.
I really enjoyed this audiobook. I enjoyed learning about the different class/type of characters in this book and why they interact the way they do with eachother.
I agree that the sex scene really came out of nowhere in this book and there is always sexual references but then only one big scene.
I really want to go back and read the other books in this series now and see how everything started and turns out.
The only thing that I really didn't enjoy about the audiobook was the voice that did the reading. She would not have been my first choice. ( )

I don't feel anything about this book, which should actually say something about how little the characters mattered to me. The plot in this book is almost non-existent, I couldn't care for the characters, didn't care if they all died, and what the actual fudge does that sex scene accomplish in the novel?
I was pretty excited for this book, but I found it lacking in most parts.

The thing that saves it a little is the voice actor of the audiobook, which is the only reason this has 2 1/2 stars instead of 1/2. ( )

Darkness Wanes by Susan Illene suffers from being part of the series. Not enough back story is given to really make sense of all the relationships and characters in the story. World building is also lacking, as it was probably done in an earlier book and not repeated in this one. This is a series that you definitely can't jump into with any book. The sex scene was unnecessary for the plot. I think a lot of urban fantasy writers suffer from the "must include sex idea." It really puts a damper in the flow of the prose. I'm still trying to figure out what the plot was supposed to be. Was it to rescue an angel from hell or rescue one of the protagonists friends? Either plot could have been interesting, but they weren't given enough time to make an emotional impact. The narrator did a decent job differentiating the characters, but some of the vocalizations of male voices lacked any emotion behind them. ( )