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.
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.
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.
