Vengeful

DNF at 45%

Not sure if I'm being more cynical and just becoming old or whatever or... authors are really selling their souls for being marketable, but this book is not what I felt like the sequel of Vicious was going to be.
I will be brutally honest, the two new characters, Marcella and June did nothing to me, other than make me roll my eyes at how abysmal Miss Schwab is at writing female characters that don't make me pissed off. She really showed that in A Darker Shade of Magic, with Lila basically being your typical special snowflake, perfect little thing who is brilliant and just can do whatever, because it will be justified at the end and no negative consequence will come to her.
The two here are basically just horrible assholes who are supposedly empowered. Honestly, I am over that, female characters being cardboard muh empowerment violence fantasies. Now some people will say “b-but women are not allowed to be angry in society so ridiculous tantrums are so new and subversive”, which is bullshit. Intellectually dishonest bullshit to justify bad behaviour.
Other than being badly written characters, they just didn't feel like they had a place in this story. The core characters from book one had so much extra to give that adding these two for marketability to big spender demographics (young women and girls) was basically just... a good financial decision, but a bad artistic one. Especially because that group already LOVED Victor, Eli, Sydney, Mitch, Dol and just yeah. Them. The ones I actually cared about. The ones whose chapters are broken up by stuck up bitchy mafia wives and crazy doctors and needless, over the top bullcrap.

I think that was one of my main issues here; we didn't need all these things. Random shit thrown in. I actually liked Vicious for being a pretty straight-forward story that didn't need a gazillion and one story lines and elements to make it enjoyable. The message was simple too; Eli wanted to do the right thing and was so wrong, while Victor didn't aim to be good but ended up doing good things.
Here? I don't even know. Honestly, it's a mess. We jump around so much with so many different things I don't care about that the actual interesting parts take forever to go anywhere and by then I'm too frustrated with meaningless crap and characters sitting around, thinking about stuff. And things. It wasn't a coherent story, but random ideas thrown into a blender without consideration.

All in all, I have no idea why this was needed, other than the author becoming a big name and now having a big market to make more money on it. Again, I have probably changed as a person and a reader since Vicious, but this really missed me with everything. I'm starting to feel Miss Schwab is one of the authors I liked that one time and now I should give up trying to recreate that feeling with any of her subsequent books. It's gone.

Have a nice day and know when to end a story!