Vicious

Don't stab me with a kitchen knife but...I found this pretty underwhelming and overdramatic.

I by no means hated it. In true Victoria Schwab fashion, it was compulsively readable; I sped through the first half in one afternoon. But somewhere around that 50% mark, the uniqueness of a story about supervillains lost the exciting appeal that I'd felt in the first half of the book. I think I was hoping it would be more of a story about morally gray characters rather than just...over the top edgelords without much nuance. I know they were supposed to be over the top and overdramatic, and I really enjoyed the tongue-in-cheek of the steepled-fingers villainy at the beginning, but over the span of the book it just became tiresome.

Still, I mostly had fun reading it, and I was thinking it would be a solid 3-star book for me. But the ending left me so utterly disappointed. Despite the melodrama of most of the book, the ending fell flat. I expected a ridiculously theatrical showdown between the main characters–arch nemeses who spent the entire book plotting to find each other to exact their revenge. I expected them to circle each other like wolves on the hunt. I expected a tête-à-tête with soliloquies about a decade of longing and plotting and the obsessive kind of hatred that consumes the soul. I expected emotional admissions of betrayal and the pain of losing a friend to the dark side. Instead, I got a bare few pages of bland physical fighting with none of the verbose, villain-like explanations that I craved. Instead, the intense drama fizzled out exactly where it was most needed and expected–the climax of the book.

Oh, also, the romance (between Eli and Serena) was so unnecessary and rapey and made me really uncomfortable. Serena has the ability to persuade people to do whatever she tells them, and there's a scene where Serena and Eli are in a bedroom, and the chapter ends with her commanding Eli to kiss her, and he does, and it's pretty heavily implied that they sleep together. THAT! IS! RAPE! Ugh.

Sorry Victoria, not my favorite of your books 🙊