Monday, July 11, 2016

Review: Vicious by V.E. Schwab

Vicious by V.E. Schwab
Vicious (Vicious #1)
By V.E. Schwab
Publisher:
Titan Books
Format: Paperback
Source: Gift from Micheline of Lunar Rainbows Reviews

To Sum It Up: College friends Victor and Eli are both extremely intelligent and extremely driven. Their academic research has them studying the possibility of ExtraOrdinaries, people with superhuman abilities, and what causes such abilities to develop. Victor and Eli take their experimentation to extremes, and the fallout sees Victor end up imprisoned for ten years while Eli takes it upon himself to eliminate EOs, whom he’s come to view as unnatural. Eli is about to find himself facing his former friend again, though, after Victor escapes from prison, all of his focus set on getting revenge against Eli.

Review: Holy morally ambiguous characters! Oh Vicious—what a deliciously twisted read you were, and what a storytelling tour de force from Victoria Schwab! I was already madly in love with her Shades of Magic series before reading this, but now I’m even more in awe of her prodigious talent because Vicious is a novel of staggering ingenuity.

Vicious is NOT your average superhero story. Oh no. Although it deals with the type of special abilities that might be associated with characters like the X-Men, Victor Vale and Eli Ever (originally Eli Cardale, but once you develop a superpower, an alliterative name is the only way to go) are neither your average heroes nor your average villains. There are no clear-cut good or bad guys here; instead you’re presented with a set of characters and their words, thoughts, and actions, and it’s up to you to form your own opinions of them. Me, I absolutely LOVE characters who walk a tightrope between good and bad, who refuse to be neatly classified as one or the other. I like my characters very, very complicated, not cookie-cutter, and Victor and Eli are about as complex as you can get, from their individual characters to their relationship with each other.

Going back to the X-Men, I definitely felt like Victor and Eli had a Professor X/Magneto dynamic going on at times. Victor and Eli are drawn to each other’s genius and there’s a mutual respect for each other’s brilliance, but that respect is also undercut by rivalry and jealousy. One-upmanship eventually leads to the destruction of their friendship and has repercussions beyond just the two of them. After Victor and Eli perform some insane experiments using themselves as the test subjects (!) to discover what causes some people to develop superhuman abilities and become ExtraOrdinary, everything just goes to hell. Victor gets locked up for the next ten years while Eli, convinced that Victor is damning proof that EOs shouldn’t exist although Eli’s an EO himself, goes hunting them down. Eli’s unwavering belief that he’s doing good by killing EOs and therefore protecting the innocent from them is absolutely chilling. And then there’s Victor, who has his fair share of blood on his hands, too, but who doesn’t share Eli’s ideology. So would Victor be somewhat of a hero for taking out Eli, as he intends to? But Victor is more than prepared to kill to get to Eli. These are the questions that you’ll turn over and over and over again in your head as you read Vicious.

The science behind EOs is really well done here. That kind of stuff can really be hit or miss with me, typically miss. Vicious, however, hits the sweet spot when getting technical. There’s just the right amount of explanation, neither too broad nor too overwhelming in detail. The existence of EOs feels entirely plausible, as does the science that produces them.

As if there wasn’t already a multitude of things to gush about with this book, I must add its narrative structure to that lengthy list. Vicious jumps back and forth between Victor and Eli’s college days in the past and their impending showdown in the present, with a few important stops along the way. It’s extremely effective in building up the suspense and tension as you wait for these two former friends turned adversaries to face each other once again. It’s that anticipation, the absolute need for this clash to happen, that produced some frenzied page-turning.

My brain is still reeling from reading this. Vicious challenges the notions of good and evil in every possible way with characters who defy moral categorization. And I savored every single page of it! Vicious was precisely my type of tale—dark, unconventional, witty, and its characters teeming with every shade of gray imaginable.

All in All: What a perfect way to kick off the second half of 2016! Vicious is easily one of my favorite books of the year, and one I won’t be forgetting about for quite a while yet.

10 comments:

  1. I seriously need to binge read all her books that I have. I love that she has a wide array of fantasy books

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    1. Read them all, read them all, lol! I LOVE her books so much- like, Stiefvater-level love!

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  2. Oh this review made me all kinds of happy! Given your love of shades of gray characters, I was hoping you'd get swept away by this story as much as I did back when I read it!! This was my very first Schwab book and it naturally made me want to read ALL her books afterwards! I think I was kind of #TeamVictor but both of the characters are equally gray...and that's what I loved about the story. I don't think I've ever read such a unique and engrossing tale of mind-fuckery LOL!

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    1. Mind-fuckery, indeed! XD Oh. My. GOD! I *still* can't get over how BRILLIANT this book is! I leaned towards Team Victor, too, hehe. He knew that he wasn't any kind of hero, whereas Eli really believed that what he was doing was right. I also rooted for Team Victor because of Mitch and Sydney. :D

      Thank you so much again for gifting this to me! ♥ ♥♥ It was an absolutely PERFECT read for me!

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  3. Omgersh!! This book looks so freaking amazing!! I've heard such good things about it!! I was sold on this book when I read the summary and heard about the amazingly done characters that are pretty much anti-heroes. I love reading books that have characters like that because it brings such a dynamic to the book and usually the plot follows in the steps of the characters. So, instead of the plot being another cookie cutter story the author takes risks and writes a more unique storyline XD

    Gah! None of the bookstores near me sell it though :(, even B&N rarely has it. I think I just need to commit to reading it and buy it on Amazon.

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    1. This is definitely worth ordering on Amazon! I loved it exactly because neither the characters nor the plot were cookie cutter. This is the kind of book that really lingers in your mind when you're done reading it; it's incredibly deep and superbly written!

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  4. I'm so glad I found this review! I've heard a lot of good things about this book, but all from sources who love books that I can't stand. Now I can't wait to read it! This sounds like exactly my type!
    (I was totally expecting a 'Batman!' after "Holy morally ambiguous characters!" Alas.)

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    1. It's definitely worth reading- hope you love it as much as I did!

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  5. My love for morally shades of gray characters is strong as well <3 I've added this one to my to-read list. It absolutely looks like one that I would love. I probably won't dive into until there are more out though. Excellent review!

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    1. I think this was originally supposed to be a standalone, and the ending gives you just enough closure for that, but there's definitely room for a sequel. Since you love morally ambiguous characters, too, I'm confident that you're going to love Vicious! :D

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