THIS SAVAGE SONG by Victoria Schwab [2.5/5★]

Stars: 2.5/5 ★ | 50/100 | C-
Review Summary: A great concept with poor execution in almost every element

Official summary:
“There’s no such thing as safe.
Kate Harker wants to be as ruthless as her father. After five years and six boarding schools, she’s finally going home to prove that she can be.
August Flynn wants to be human. But he isn’t. He’s a monster, one that can steal souls with a song. He’s one of the three most powerful monsters in a city overrun with them. His own father’s secret weapon.
Their city is divided.
Their city is crumbling.
Kate and August are the only two who see both sides, the only two who could do something. But how do you decide to be a hero or a villain when it’s hard to tell which is which?”

Review:
World-building, plot, and pacing
Personally I find the disappointment of world-building with a spark of brilliance that doesn’t reach its full potential leaves a more negative impression than if it had been just plain bad. If everything about a book is bad then nothing of value was lost, but if an author manages to come up with a great premise and then squanders it they’ve prevented that exact premise from ever being done well. The idea of different breeds of monsters that prey on humans, a city divided on how to protect themselves, and a protagonist from each side of the city - one the heir of its leader and one a monster himself - is an intriguing premise with a lot of potential, but unfortunately the world-building was unfinished. When the world-building hadn’t yet been fully explained to us, I expected an outer wasteland populated with monsters surrounding a walled city of civilians, with the safety zones being a ring of red closest to the wall into a relative haven of green in the center. The fact that the monsters populated the center of the city and were kept at bay by a leader was an original concept, but I didn’t find it’s reasoning believable. The initial event that brought the Corsai under his control is not public knowledge, but since they are of a hive-mind and seemingly quite stupid, their obedience is questionable, but not unbelievable. What ties the Malcahi to Harker, on the other hand, is not addressed.* They are far from stupid, and just one of them is a tough match for a human in a fight. I didn’t find Callum Harker’s control over the Malchai at all believable, when there were teeming hordes of monsters and one singular Callum Harker. He had no force to protect himself or the city - because that was the method of Flynn and the South - except his personal guard made of Malchai. What were the benefits for the Malchai to stay loyal to Harker? And since they couldn’t eat whoever they wanted, what were they feeding on?*
Kate and August’s on-the-run plot point felt to me like it should have been an Act III plot, instead it started around halfway and took us right through until just before the very end of the novel. It made the second half feel overly long and drawn-out and threw off the pacing as a result. The plot never strayed from what felt like the most obvious progression from one point to the next, and the plot “twists” varied from dull to obvious. I seriously struggled to finish the last 30 or so percent of the book, I wouldn’t have if I were actually capable of DNFing something that far into it. It took me a damn week to read when it should have taken 3 days TOPS.

Characters
Kate Harker was a refreshing character purely because her character type has, in the past, been written overwhelmingly as a man. The heir that needs to prove himself: his older brother was the perfect heir, but he died, and his father resents him for it; he is the eldest, but he is a bastard; he is the eldest, he seems the perfect heir - but deep down he is afraid, and his father knows it. This is a well-worn character, but with the variety and complexity of female characters lagging so behind their male counterparts, Kate Harker’s embattled heir was just different enough to be interesting.
The man-made monster who wants to be human, while not as frequently portrayed, is also not new; but in this case I didn’t think Schwab brought anything new to the character, only to his origin.
Honestly the best thing about this book is that there are two protagonists, a girl and a boy on opposing sides in the classic Romeo and Juliet setup...and they don’t fall in love. It’s a YA book and they become friends and don’t fall in love - A MIRACLE!!!
Personally I thought this story was badly in need of more main characters to bring depth both to the world and to the story. Every character outside of Kate and August really only existed to populate the world and drive the plot. None of the other characters had any real depth, and the majority of the them were basic archetypes. Leo: the perfect soldier without a heart; Isla: the dizzy, loving girl that hides a deep sadness and makes vague prophesying remarks to create atmosphere~; Henry and his wife whose name I can’t even remember: the concerned parents who hold the protagonist back from what he wants out of love; Sloan: the suspicious servant who wants power for himself; Callum Harker: the tyrant who only cares about power and money; the attempt at giving August a best friend whose name I also can’t remember who totally disappeared when he wasn’t useful anymore. To create such an interesting and unique world and then populate it with nothing but incidental and clichéd characters is honestly so lazy as to be offensive to me.

Prose
The writing was nothing special, and several elements of it bothered me. First, Schwab began most of her sentences with the topic (he, she, it, they, the), which isn’t so bad by itself, but the vast majority of the sentences were short enough that the next sentence beginning with the topic came very quickly, and the syntax became repetitious. Second, Schwab overused asyndeton (leaving out conjunctions eg. “She walked over, and sat down,” vs. “She walked over, sat down,”) merely to vary her syntax rather than using it to any real effect. And lastly, as seems to be common in YA, she overused starting a new paragraph to create dramatic effect, rendering all of the attempts common rather than dramatic.

Female Characters *Vague spoilers for information we receive early on, major spoilers under a spoiler tab*
As I said above, Kate fulfilled a traditionally masculine role in the story; the female lead was the brutal one and the male lead the sensitive one. Unfortunately, nearly every other female character is an archetype rooted in misogyny, or of no consequence whatsoever.
Kate’s dead mother joins thousands of other dead wives and mothers who died purely for the sake of plot; to be out-of-the-way and something for surviving characters to angst about. If she had had a personality and any agency - say she had died bravely fighting in the land wars - it wouldn’t have been so bad - dead parents are practically the foundation of fictional heroes, afterall. Alas, she was nothing but an inconsequential wife and mother who fled in terror and died in a car crash. Original.

And the fact the Callum had her murdered for being “weak” when he could have just let her leave...YIKES.

I liked Isla, but the “dizzy, loving girl that hides a deep sadness and makes vague prophesying remarks to create atmosphere~” is SO TIRED. The most basic and numerous kind of female character. She’s powerful, yes, so at least she’s not useless, but her power is a juxtaposition to her sweet nature; Leo is powerful and knows it and actually gets to use that power. Isla power gets her locked up like the oldest archetype of female character: the princess in the castle.

When Sloan said he had killed her I looked at the camera like I was on The Office (I don’t understand how Sloan even captured her. We saw the Sunai’s powers work on everyone, she should’ve been able to just start singing and waltz on out of there with how powerful she had been described as earlier on). I suspected a fake-out and was glad when I was right, but I’ve already seen spoilers that she sacrifices herself in the second book, thus fulfilling the role of the sweet young virgin who chooses to sacrifice herself for the good of others - a female role straight out of Ancient Greek tragedy from hundreds of years B.C.E. Sigh.

There was also Henry’s wife who appeared so little I don’t remember her name, and who I only remember in relation to her husband. The character of Paris, who owned the house at the end of the tunnel that allowed August to pass through the seam, had a whole lot of interesting backstory and then wasn’t used for anything.
I honestly don’t know why but I plan on reading the sequel. The plot seems interesting?
This was my first experience with a book that came highly recommended that disappointed me greatly, but the juxtaposition of the hype and my disappointment was enough to make me so annoyed that I felt compelled to write a review, and from then on for every book I read. So something good came of it, at least.

Weaker points:
Prose
Plot
Pacing
Secondary characters
World building

Stronger points:
Premise
Setting
Atmosphere
Lack of romance

Content/age appropriateness warnings: character death (nobody nice though), violence, monsters, a car accident, a generally dark and creepy atmosphere etc.

*As far as I can remember. Please correct me if I am wrong; I went back through the book to check as best I could.

A DARKLY BEATING HEART by Lindsay Smith [3/5★]

Review summary: A diverse, dark tale with a certain maturity not fully realized

Official Summary:
“No one knows what to do with Reiko. She is full of hatred. All she can think about is how to best hurt herself and the people closest to her. After a failed suicide attempt, Reiko’s parents send her from their Seattle home to spend the summer with family in Japan to learn to control her emotions. But while visiting Kuramagi, a historic village preserved to reflect the nineteenth-century Edo period, Reiko finds herself slipping back in time into the life of Miyu, a young woman even more bent on revenge than Reiko herself. Reiko loves being Miyu, until she discovers the secret of Kuramagi village, and must face down Miyu’s demons as well as her own.
A time-travel story that alternates between modern day and 19th century Japan as one girl confronts the darkness lurking in her soul.”

Review:
This book offers so much that we want but don’t usually get from Young Adult fiction, but suffers from some fundamental flaws that unfortunately stop it from being the book of our dreams. Our protagonist is Reiko, a mentally-ill bisexual Japanese-American girl. If you were looking at a line graph depicting how many axes of oppression their protagonists were operating on, “A Darkly Beating Heart” would send the line positively soaring upwards. And they aren’t just labels there for show, they’re integral to the story. On top of that, this novel deals with some very heavy topics: suicide, self harm, psychiatric medication, disordered eating, manipulation and betrayal, sibling abuse, homicidal feelings, revenge, and - after it all - forgiveness and moving on. If that sounds melodramatic, it’s not just a collection of buzzworthy topics thrown together for drama. A lot of these things come hand-in-hand, after all.
There are essentially two different plots, one for Reiko’s normal life and one for her time as Miyu, until they converge during the climax of the novel. Both are interesting, and both have building tension and secrets to be revealed. The climax had plot twists for both storylines, and had the interesting element of revealing new information about events we thought we already understood, altering our perception of the events but also the characters, including Reiko herself.
Smith does a wonderful job creating a roiling, dark atmosphere in Kuramagi, a creeping sense of wrongness and things to come. She also captures the essential feeling of a small historical Japanese town, its charms and unique qualities: so much so that I really wanted to visit even though there was evil shit going on. The time spent in Tokyo at the beginning of the novel also captured the city well; even the way Aki’s “lifestyle brand” was named accurately imitated the way Japanese pop-culture titles things, in a way the West doesn’t. Smith had her book beta read by a Japanese-American girl for accuracy, and she has spoken about how Reiko’s struggle with being ethnically Japanese but not knowing the Japanese language resonated with her. I appreciated the depiction of female anger, of Reiko being allowed to be unapologetically furious and vengeful, something often still considered “unladylike” or something women aren’t even capable of (unless they’ve got their period, amirite!).
Rather than being riddled with minor annoyances that amount to major dissatisfaction, this novel suffers from two major flaws, but these flaws only (in my opinion, of course):

1. Laying on the revenge and darkness talk way too thick, to the point of corniness
2. Underdeveloped in key places, namely the backstory and the ending

Reiko’s first-person perspective unfortunately completely overdoes her narrative of bottomless, black depression and her desire for the ultimate revenge to make her enemies suffer the depths of despair the have plunged her into etc. etc. The very first instances of it were already overwrought, and unfortunately she continued to keep bringing it up and laying it on thick consistently throughout the novel. If you have less time for bullshit of this variety than me or a lower tolerance for corniness then you’d probably struggle to make it through this novel. Personally, while I did find it silly, I was enjoying myself enough to keep going. And honestly, while it doesn’t mean it’s uncritiquable, it isn’t even unrealistic - she’s a teenager, afterall. The teenage years are the height of melodramatic angst. (I was a teenager at the height of the Emo trend, okay. I know these things.)
There are many events that happen before the novel begins that are hugely important to the narrative, mostly in creating the anger and despair that have set Reiko on the path she’s chosen. Many of them, most importantly her abusive relationship with her brother, needed more development to justify and help us understand Reiko’s reaction to them. It also would have added great depth to Reiko’s character arc and the story overall, which was instead left feeling more superficial than it could have been. And the novel is only sixty-thousand words, definitely on the short side even for YA, so it’s not that words that could have been used for this purpose were already used elsewhere. It is at least an upside that they weren’t wasted elsewhere resulting in a novel of many words and little substance.
The climax of the plot as well the wrap-up the closes the novel are too rushed. The rising action of the final act comes to an abrupt end, undercutting its own effectiveness. Everything from then on resolves itself quickly and easily, and Reiko’s life post-plot heads towards happiness without much effort on her part. While she learned lessons in her time as Miyu that would resolve some of her issues very quickly, as only a supernatural experience could, a rage as deep as hers seemed (thanks to the aforementioned overdone narrative) would not have immediately evaporated with Miyu’s spirit, and seeing Reiko work through her problems and take responsibility for her actions would have made for both a more realistic and a more satisfying ending.

What really held this book together for me and made it enjoyable despite its shortcomings, was the well-written prose. The flow of Smith’s prose swept me through the novel despite whatever misgivings I had so I still found the novel enjoyable in a way I wouldn’t have had the prose been clunky on top of the other flaws. Because of the novel’s short length the pacing is quick, and it’s an easy read. “A Darkly Beating Heart” had, for me, a spark of something deeper than we usually see in YA and not just because it dealt with “mature” topics. It wasn’t fully-realized, however, so I can’t quite pin down what it was, but I found it somewhat compelling nonetheless. I think if you have a good imagination you can read this novel and, thinking it over, you can flesh it out into what it could have been yourself. I think it’s worth it.

Weaker points:
Backstory/development
Corniness
Ending

Stronger points:
Prose
Diversity/representation
Plot
Setting
Atmosphere
Themes (suicide, self harm, psychiatric medication, disordered eating, manipulation and betrayal, sibling abuse, homicidal feelings, revenge)

Content/age appropriateness warnings: discussion of suicide/homicide, disordered eating, explicit self-harm, non-explicit sex, discussion of emotional and physical abuse and manipulation, physical violence and blood

SCYTHE by Neal Shusterman [2.5/5★]

Official summary:
“Thou shalt kill. A world with no hunger, no disease, no war, no misery. Humanity has conquered all those things, and has even conquered death. Now scythes are the only ones who can end life—and they are commanded to do so, in order to keep the size of the population under control. Citra and Rowan are chosen to apprentice to a scythe—a role that neither wants. These teens must master the “art” of taking life, knowing that the consequence of failure could mean losing their own.”

Review:
Let’s just get right into it.
In the world of “Scythe”, humans advanced the Cloud and amassed information in it until it achieved sentience and omnipotence, and became known as the Thunderhead. It solved all the world’s problems: hunger, economic inequality, overpopulation, war, even death. All diseases have been eliminated, the body’s natural process of senescence can be endlessly reversed, the world is in such a state of peace that there is no war or even murder, there is enough food so that nobody can starve. Only death by accident remains - but not to fear, for this society can reverse even death itself.
Unfortunately, people have tried and failed to branch out to other planets, and while the population is much higher than our current one with none of the problems, our earth only has so much space.

“We have one very limited world, and although death has been defeated as completely as polio, people still must die.”

“The ratio of population growth to the Thunderhead’s ability to provide for humanity requires that a certain number of people be gleaned each year...”

So overpopulation is the sole reason people still have to die. Everything, literally everything, in this new world is fair and just, because the Thunderhead has made it so. So what would a fair method of manufacturing death be? Perhaps, everybody gets a certain number of years to live - the number being calculated by the Thunderhead to allow people to live the maximum number of years that still prevents overpopulation - and then they are no longer allowed to reverse senescence, and they either die of old age or undergo euthanasia. Fair and just.
Is this what they do in this new world? Unfathomably, absolutely the fuck not. Instead, they have scythes to mete out death via a system that allows a 16 year-old to be selected to die while the average lifespan is hundreds of years and people like Rowan’s grandmother are on god-knows-what-number husband and having new babies while her grandchild is sixteen. Not only is that extremely unfair to the 16 year-old, but there’s your overpopulation problem, right there.
The system upon which this entire novel is based makes no goddamn sense whatsoever. They claim to live in a perfect world but then intentionally recreate the most unfair system of our world: the randomness of death. It’s entirely avoidable and then they do it anyway. The scythe that chose to kill the 16 year-old did so on the basis that a percentage of deaths in our world - the Mortal World - were caused by car accidents, and an overconfident teenage boy with a penchant for getting drunk was a prime candidate for a car accident. So the Thunderhead, in all its omnipotence, eliminated car accidents, only for scythes to kill people basically in the name of car accidents. I very sincerely cannot fucking even with this.

“There was only one thing the Thunderhead was not given authority over.
The Scythedom.
When it was decided that people needed to die in order to ease the tide of population growth, it was also decided that this must be the responsibility of humans. Bridge repair and urban planning could be handled by the Thunderhead, but taking a life was an act of conscience and consciousness. Since it could not be proven that the Thunderhead had either, the Scythedom was born.
I do not regret the decision, but I often wonder if the Thunderhead would have done a better job.”

If the entire premise weren’t fundamentally flawed then it would be absolutely obvious to the characters that the Thunderhead would absolutely have done a better job.
It is the job of the scythe to decide who dies “fairly” and without bias, selecting evenly across gender, race, age, family size, even level of attractiveness. Because it was decided that death was a human responsibility, scythes can use the Thunderhead as a database but not harness its sentience to select who will die. Even without the Thunderhead’s sentience, they could enter their parameters and then use the Thunderhead like a random number generator to generate their victims. Instead they’re not allowed to do this and humans who are incapable of not being biased have to chose. Once again, this makes no sense, and is purely to manufacture another part of a scythe’s job and add weight and drama~ to the process.*
The same reasoning applies to why the Scythedom is the single human-governed system: so that their meetings and the corruption caused by their human failings can be part of the plot. They’ve also allowed themselves to be subject only to a set of laws that govern their roles as scythes, putting them above the laws that apply to everyone else., which is just asking for trouble. Goddard doesn’t even follow the Scythe Commandments anyway, ignoring “Thou shalt kill with no bias” so he can steal peoples’ properties and possessions by threatening to “glean” them if they don’t hand it over. Their whole Scythedom is a mess.

*There is also a part where the Thunderhead is not searchable by date or location like a useful computer, but instead is more like a human brain and groups things by image association, making it more difficult for a character to find what they’re looking for. It was nonsensical and purely to manufacture plot. And just because the Thunderhead is not involved in the business of Scythes it’s not even allowed to record them the way it does everyone else, which is a great way for them to get totally out of hand.

Now onto the actually killing - or “gleaning”. They call it by a euphemism because it’s not “socially or morally correct” to call it killing, and yet they are allowed to “glean” people however they want: from the pain and general unpleasantness - no matter how brief - of slitting their throat to death by flamethrower. Yes, these honorable ‘gleaners’ are allowed to incinerate their victims with a goddamn flamethrower. There is no reason whatsoever for these people to be killed anyway other than instantly and painlessly, but where’s the drama in that? Furthermore it makes weapons and combat training part of scythe training., ie. yet more total nonsensicality to create plot.** The scythes won’t even allow these people to be informed of their impending death ahead of time, not only to maybe get their affairs in order or do something they love for the last time, they’re not even allowed to say goodbye to their families. Why? Once again, no goddamn reason whatsoever! Everything about it is needlessly cruel. And the “Mass Gleanings”, carried out by the antagonist and his “New Order” scythes, are nothing short of legally sanctioned terrorist attacks.

**It also makes the creation of new weapons one of the few industries left in this “utopia” (not that a utopia should even have weapons) and the pitching of them part of the Scythe’s gatherings. There is a scene where the creator of a new weapon is pitching it to the scythes and they test it by using it on her AND KILLING HER. Not only is that a terrible idea because they’re prevented her from creating any new weapons for them but also WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK???

Basically if you base an argument on a flawed premise, no matter how well constructed that argument is, it’s negated by its very foundation being incorrect. This book had its merits, but since they were either involved with or directly stemmed from a flawed premise, I couldn’t care for the whole.
Even so, if it hadn’t had fundamental premise flaws it still would have only been about a 3 star read for me, and here’s why.

Prose/Writing
The prose is good enough to be unobtrusive (ie. not jarring or pulling you out of the story with an awkward turn of phrase) but really nothing beyond that. Schuster’s use of words did nothing to elicit any emotion from me, and everything felt rather vague due to a lack of meaningful description.

Character Rowan started out bland and gradually became more interesting. His development was still a little shallow, however. The classic “Woe, what am I becoming?” narrative without much emotional depth or originality. Plotwise he went ALL THE WAY OFF towards the end, and I look forward to his character in the sequel. I also appreciate how he took drastic action when the opportunity presented itself and took fixing their fucked up system into his own hands with little apprehension. I love a character that gets shit done without protracted soul-searching first just to prolong the plot and create drama (especially since Schusterman sure did enough of that elsewhere).
In contrast to Rowan, Citra started out with interesting potential but just coasted as a character from there. She definitely got the weaker plot once they were separated. I still feel like I don’t really know her and therefore don’t have much to say.
Faraday and Curie were very interesting characters, and served well as counterpoints to the youth and inexperience of Rowan and Citra.
At first I thought Goddard was a bit of a cartoon villain and that the existence of someone like him was antithetical to a utopia, but as we saw more and more of the Scythedom I could absolutely see how their bullshit system breed someone like him.

I’ll comment here on the romance, which was only a few brief mentions and therefore unobtrusive but it was still undeveloped, shoehorned in, and ultimately pointless.

Plot, Pacing, Structure
It was hard to judge the plot and pacing of this novel, because I think a lot of the interest in the first half would have been generated by the world-building of the Scythedom, but because I found it fundamentally flawed I not only wasn’t interested, I was annoyed and mildly angry the entire time. The second half was more plot-driven and definitely more interesting, and the last about 20% was quite thrilling. I may have whooped a few times, even.
There are two elements to the worldbuilding: the utopic world created by the Thunderhead, and the Scythedom within that. The Scythedom is the dominant aspect, and maybe if it had made any sense it would have absorbed my focus. Instead, I found myself more interested in the society that was utopian but still rather bleak. Because of the Thunderhead, everything that can be known is known, anything that can be created is created “perfectly” by the Thunderhead. So there is no academia, people no longer create any kind of art or music, there are no governments to be staffed, no celebrities but Scythes to fawn over, no problems of war and peace or crime and justice to be answered. Basically there’s hardly anything left to do, and certainly nothing intellectually or creatively satisfying. People live for so long and have so many kids that they don’t even care about them.
Schusterman himself has confirmed his world was not intended as the classic dystopia masquerading as a utopia, like almost every dystopia in fact does (eg. Zamyatin’s “We”, Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, Huxley’s “Brave New World”, Lowry’s “The Giver”, and Collin’s “The Hunger Games”). Instead, it poses a genuine question: what is “perfection”? Where does it end? And what comes afterwards? It may be “perfect” but as an academic and an artist, it’s not a world I would want to live in.
There is of course the rest of the series to explore this aspect, but I do feel there could have been some more substantial exploration in this book. I’m not even entirely sure that I buy that the Thunderhead’s “perfection” would cease all creativity, so exploration of this topic could have solidified the foundation of the utopia better.
I do have one fully-formed criticism of it, though: It’s a “utopia”. All oppression and suffering is gone. It’s like 1000 years in the future from our time. And yet everyone, every character passingly mentioned, is fucking straight. Every woman has a husband and every man has a wife. Every child has a mother and a father. Utopia? More like hetero hellscape. Goddard makes a passing reference to the existence of gay people in a sexual way and that’s fucking it. I let the social construct of gender still being in place slide since this is a product of our current time, but not a single regular citizen being mentioned to have a same-sex partner is a joke.
Scythes are commanded to keep a journal, and each chapter began with a journal entry mostly from Scythe Currie, but also others. They were a great inclusion, and for me the most interesting and well executed aspect of the novel.

Ultimately, I am (unfortunately?) interested in the sequel, because based on the ending of this one the plot it’s likely to have is one of my favourite kinds. We’ll see how it goes.

I have decided to forgo the weaker and stronger aspects breakdown for this novel since it was so inconsistent even within the same aspects I had a hell of a time trying to make it.

Content/age appropriateness warnings: a lot of murder and blood, obviously, but that’s all I can remember