Daybreak by Autumn Woods: A Finale Done Right

Synopsis

Alex’s Corbeau-Green’s world is burning down around him, and Ophelia Winters is desperate to prove she didn’t light the fire.

When Ophelia first accepted a scholarship from Sorrowsong, an elite university in the Scottish Highlands, she wanted nothing more than to destroy Alex and his family at any cost. But that was before she knew him, before they became each other’s everything. Now, after an unthinkable betrayal and the disappearance of his father, Alex is forced to return to New York, desperate to forget what they had, and salvage the damage done to his family. In Scotland, Ophelia is left reeling, alone . . . and watched.

With a new anonymous tormentor threatening to release evidence that Ophelia and Alex committed a murder on campus, it’s clear that they’re going to need each other once again. But can they find a way to trust each other, and repair the love that they had? And even if they can—will it be enough this time to keep them alive?

Review

4.5 stars

I flew through this duology, and I have absolutely no regrets.

Fair warning: if you haven’t read Nightshade yet and plan to, step away now — spoilers ahead.

Daybreak opens with the kind of distance that feels insurmountable: Ophelia still in Scotland, Alex back in New York after her article was leaked, his family suddenly exposed and his father on the run. The weight he’s carrying would buckle most people: stepping into the CEO role at Green Enterprises (a future he never chose), holding his six younger sisters together, searching for a treatment for his mother. And with Ophelia so far away Alex finds himself back in a very dark place.

Ophelia, meanwhile, is drowning in guilt. She never meant for that article to go public, and watching the fallout hasn’t made it easier to forgive herself. She misses Alex, but she can’t quite picture how they’d work, him in New York running a company, her rooted in Scotland with a fear of flying and a past she’s still sorting through. And somewhere in the background, a new stalker has made himself known.

What this series does so well is let its characters feel things fully … and drag you along with them. Alex fell first, and he fell completely, but Ophelia wasn’t far behind. You can see exactly why they belong together, which makes every obstacle between them all the more frustrating to watch.

Alex’s chapters were the ones that moved me the most. He’s giving everything to his family, his ambitions, his peace of mind, any claim to a life of his own and doing it quietly, without asking for anything in return. His depression is written without compromise: he thinks about ending his life every day, and what keeps him going are small, specific things. Mia’s cookies. Josie’s drawings. The next moment, and the one after that. He let himself have one exception to his carefully managed existence, Ophelia, and even that feels like something he doesn’t quite deserve.

Ophelia’s journey is its own kind of painful. Four years of grief have left her isolated and hypersensitive to everything, and the guilt she carries over the article, even knowing she wasn’t the one who published it, sits heavy. Watching her slowly, reluctantly, start to believe she might be worth loving was one of the most satisfying arcs in the book.

I was glad that we had Colette, Magda, and Dyvia. The friendship these three offer Ophelia is warm and fierce and exactly what she needed. After so long on her own, it was good to see someone have her back.

The mystery threads with Ophelia’s stalker, the question of what Cain Green’s disappearance would eventually mean , kept a low hum of tension running underneath everything. I kept expecting his return, and kept bracing for what it might cost them.

This duology is romance that takes its characters seriously with flawed people carrying real weight, working through grief and depression without shortcuts, finding their way toward each other anyway. Unique, honest, and deeply moving.

Thank you to PanMacmillan Export for the advanced reading copy.

Thanks for reading.