Review: Where The Dark Stands Still

Where The Dark Stands Still by A.B. Poranek

Published By: Penguin / Random House
Publication Date: February 27, 2024
Date Read: June 27, 2025
Genre: YA – Fantasy
Source: Bought
Format: Paperback
Pages: 416

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A sweeping gothic fairytale romance for fans of Belladonna by Adalyn Grace and Gallant by V.E. Schwab.

Raised in a small village near the spirit-wood, Liska Radost knows that Magic is monstrous, and its practitioners, monsters.

After Liska unleashes her own powers with devastating consequences, she is caught by the demon warden of the wood – the Leszy – who offers her a bargain: one year of servitude in exchange for a wish.

Whisked away to his crumbling manor, Liska makes an unsettling discovery: she is not the first person to strike this bargain and all of her predecessors have mysteriously vanished. If Liska wants to survive the year and return home, she must unravel her host’s spool of secrets and face the ghosts of his past.

Those who enter the wood do not always return . . .

“Fate. What is fate but an excuse to surrender responsibility?”

Where The Dark Stands Still is a book that has been on my radar since it first released last year. I’m such a huge fan of YA Fantasy, and this one sounded right up my street. I was super excited to dive in and when it fit one of the prompt’s for my YA bookclub, I thought it was the perfect time to dive in. Before starting Where The Dark Stands Still I had seen so many people raving over this book, which made me ridiculously excited to dive in. 2025 has been such a slumpy year for me, and I was preying that this was going to be the book that brought me out of it. I definitely wouldn’t consider myself in a book slump anymore, however I didn’t love this one quite as much as I was expecting to.

Where The Dark Stands Still follows the story of Liska, a young girl from a small village where magic is seen as evil. Liska has magic, and when she does something drastic with her magic, she escapes into the magical woodland in search of the Leszy, the demon of the wood. She is determined to bargain with him to get rid of her magic. When the Leszy offers her the deal, if she spends a year with him, she agrees. But not everything is as it seems with the Leszy and Liska is determined to find out more about him.

One thing I really enjoyed about Where The Dark Stands Still is the polish folktales/mythology. I’m such a big fan of mythology and folklore, and I’ve personally never read anything inspired by polish folktales. I was really excited to find out more about these tales, but for me I just felt like it wasn’t explained as well as it could have been. For me, there was a lot of Polish mythological creatures mentioned multiple times, without actually explaining what they were. This led to me having to stop reading to google what they were, bringing me out of the reading experience.

In addition to this, I did find this book to have a number of pacing issues. I found it slow to get into due to the sheer amount of polish creatures and names that I really didn’t know how to pronounce. Once we got more into the plot into the Leszy and Liska in the woodland, I started to really enjoy it. However once I started getting really excited and into the story, I felt like the pacing slowed down again and I found myself getting a little bit bored.

Overall, I really did like Where The Dark Stands Still. It was an interesting, gothic storyline, but there were a few issues that affected my enjoyment a little bit. I probably wouldn’t read this one again, however I would definitely give A.B. Poranek’s future books a go. It was a solid YA Fantasy that I’m sure other people will adore. If you’re intrigued by this one, I’d definitely recommend giving it a go.

“Anything can be a door. You simply need to know how to open it.”