I am so happy to be welcoming Rachel Churcher back today, with book three of her Battle Ground series, Darkest Hour. If you are yet to discover this brilliant, thought-provoking series, you might want to check out my previous reviews for Battle Ground (Book 1) and False Flag (Book 2) before you read any further, to avoid spoilers. Many thanks to Rachel, and to Rachel Gilbey at Rachel’s Random Resources for inviting me to be a part of this blog tour, and for providing me with a copy of the book.
BLURB:
Bex Ellman and Ketty Smith are fighting on opposite sides in a British civil war. Bex and her friends are in hiding, but when Ketty threatens her family, Bex learns that her safety is more fragile than she thought.
The Battle Ground series is set in a dystopian near-future UK, after Brexit and Scottish independence and you can purchase your copy of this fantastic book here.
REVIEW:
Well, what can I say about this book apart from wow! This series just gets better and better!
Darkest Hour picks up in the aftermath of Battle Ground and False Flag, uniting the timelines of Bex and Ketty and continuing the story from both points of view. We find Bex and her friends in hiding in the north of England whilst Ketty is making her way through the ranks in London.
The Battle Ground series has never felt entirely comfortable reading, and as I continued through Darkest Hour this became more and more true. Watching our own country’s government descend into chaos, there is a lot about this series that just feels all too possible at the moment.
As I continued to find out more about each of the characters in this book, it raised so many questions in my mind about what I would do if I found myself in their situation, and the waves of emotion I felt for people on both sides of the conflict served to prove that nothing is as black and white as it first seems. There was a character I wanted to punch at times, and another I felt overwhelming sympathy for, neither of whom I would have previously expected to feel this way about. As much as I felt I should be on the side of the resistance forces, it was Ketty and Bracken’s story that really captured by attention this time round, and it is still their situation that fills my thoughts even the day after I finished reading.
Darkest Hour is an incredibly thought-provoking read, and has left me with a hole in my heart while I wait to find out what is coming next.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rachel Churcher was born between the last manned moon landing, and the first orbital Space Shuttle mission. She remembers watching the launch of STS-1, and falling in love with space flight, at the age of five. She fell in love with science fiction shortly after that, and in her teens she discovered dystopian fiction. In an effort to find out what she wanted to do with her life, she collected degrees and other qualifications in Geography, Science Fiction Studies, Architectural Technology, Childminding, and Writing for Radio.
She has worked as an editor on national and in-house magazines; as an IT trainer; and as a freelance writer and artist. She has renovated several properties, and has plenty of horror stories to tell about dangerous electrics and nightmare plumbers. She enjoys reading, travelling, stargazing, and eating good food with good friends – but nothing makes her as happy as writing fiction.
Her first published short story appeared in an anthology in 2014, and the Battle Ground series is her first long-form work. Rachel lives in East Anglia, in a house with a large library and a conservatory full of house plants. She would love to live on Mars, but only if she’s allowed to bring her books.
SOCIAL MEDIA:
Make sure you check out the other blogs taking part in this tour.
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