Charlotte Kersten

“Hate cannot be fought with hate. Evil cannot be conquered by darkness. Only love has the power to conquer them both.”

Year published: 2013

Categories: YA, fantasy

Summary: The convent has returned Sybella to a life that nearly drove her mad. Her father’s rage and brutality are terrifying, and her brother’s love is equally monstrous. When she discovers an unexpected ally imprisoned in the dungeons, will a a daughter of Death find something other than vengeance to live for?

What I Thought: I made the debatable decision to start this series here instead of book one because this book is the one that I was particularly interested in. Thanks, Recaptains, for making my strange decisions easier! I’d say that Dark Triumph stands out from other YA fantasies I’ve read mainly because of its difficult main character and willingness to explore her suffering. I enjoyed Sybella as a protagonist because I like that she’s such a difficult character – full of despair and self-hatred, vicious and manipulative and cynical. You see this side of her the most often, but there are other moments that belie a softer interior, particularly with her sisters, Ismae, and her love interest Beast. She eventually sees the way that all of her hardness exists to protect her from the self- blame that she carries with her. We see this self-blame many times, especially for Alyse’s death and her brother’s actions towards her. She assumes that people hate her as much as she hates herself for being a part of the d’Arbret family, leaping to the conclusion that Beast must hate her and she has ruined their budding relationship when he finds out about who she is.

Her journey is one of realizing that the hardness meant to protect her from that blame is just hurting her even more, and that she does not need to blame herself for everything that has happened to her or the family she was born into. She realizes that she is being used all over again by the abbess, makes meaning of her suffering to become Death’s justice and starts to self-describe as a survivor. I really like this trajectory overall, but I will say that things feel a bit too tidy and perfect to me given that, after her encounter with Mortmain in the graveyard, she says that “all the fear and doubt and shame are stripped away” so that she doesn’t struggle with them at all anymore.

Her father D’Arbret is a veritable caricature of evil and there are multiple rape threats towards towards nearly every single female character at every time there possibly could be one, which ends up feeling like a bit much. Probably the most effective moment in Dark Triumph’s handling of rape culture is when all of the men on the Duchess’ council initially refuse to believe Sybella about her father’s abuse of his wives and his plans for the Duchess. Sybella’s feelings towards her brother Julian are very interesting and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this part of the book. When she was younger, Sybella felt that she had to accept his sexual advances for him to still love her and be her friend, and at the end of the book he sacrifices himself to save her and her feelings about him are greatly softened. There is a lot of emphasis on the fact that he was also abused by their father, and the overall feeling I have is that the book wants to make it clear that his own abusive actions happened on the basis that he himself was being abused – BUT what he did was still absolutely wrong. His own suffering is an explanation, not an excuse. This is obviously an incredibly sensitive issue and I can understand people’s feelings about the issue itself and the book’s handling of it varying widely.

On the final subject of the romance, I really didn’t like the fact that Beast hit her a couple of times, once when lucid and once when delirious, as well as the basic fact of their relationship featuring a significant age gap when she is seventeen. If I could ignore both of these things, I would just say that I think it could have used a lot more development, but I did like the scene where she unburdens herself of all her secrets to him and he validates that none of the things that happened to her were her fault and makes sure that they only have sex if she really is sure that she wants to.

I’m not particularly inclined to read any more of the series and I am clearly mixed about how the book handles its themes, but Sybella was an interesting character to spend time with and I don’t regret doing so.