4⭐️.5🌶 I finished my ARC of Umbra by Catalina Matei last evening. It was okay. It is being marketed as book one of a new series. Now that I've read some other reviews, (I like to go in blind and don't read reviews prior to reading books usually.) This is more like book 4 in a series, which is why I felt so lost at first. We as readers are dumped into the thick of it twelve months after a pivitol event happens. Nearly the entire book is told in flash backs to catch us up to where we are. There is a bunch of info dumping and so much internal monolog. It wasn't difficult to follow necessarily but it was not a style of storytelling I'm used to that's for sure. It was difficult to connect with the characters as their grief felt more like whining because we weren't given a chance to connect with them emotionally. We were constantly being buffeted from the past back to the present. The bulk of the story was depressing as ...