Review: Vengeful by V.E. Schwab

Vengeful (Villains #2)
By V.E. Schwab
Publisher: Tor
Format: Hardcover
Source: Purchased

To Sum It Up: It’s been five years since ExtraOrdinaries Victor Vale and Eli Ever faced off, with Victor seemingly killed and Eli captured. With the help of another EO, however, Victor is alive, though not well and deteriorating at an alarming rate. Meanwhile back in Merit, once the scene of Victor and Eli’s showdown, a new EO named Marcella Riggins is literally using her bare hands to destroy anyone who stands in her way of taking control of the city. Marcella’s power is so formidable that it may take turning to the currently imprisoned Eli for help in stopping her.

Review: I finally read Vengeful, the highly anticipated sequel to Vicious, one of the best stories about morally ambiguous characters EVER. I’d say THE BEST that I’ve ever read. And everyone continues to walk a fine line between good and evil in Vengeful.

Once again, Victoria Schwab jumps back and forth between the present and the past to unreel her narrative. Five years have passed since Victor and Eli met for what appeared to be the final time. Eli is now the prisoner of EON, an organization headed by Joseph Stell, the former detective who locked Victor up. Stell thinks that EOs might be rehabilitated into using their abilities for something other than wrongdoing. Eli, who once hunted EOs down and killed them in his belief that they were abominations, finds this notion preposterous and insists to Stell that heroes are not in an EO’s nature. When a new EO named Marcella Riggins threatens to destroy Merit in her quest for power, Stell reluctantly realizes that his best hope for stopping Marcella may be Eli Cardale. Watching Stell and Eli try to stay one step ahead of each other is absolutely riveting.

We also get some significant backstory for Eli that details the development of that carefully calculated veneer. I love how Schwab constantly challenges the reader, both in Vicious and in Vengeful, to rethink their views of the characters by making them so complex. You can’t help but wonder what Eli’s life would have been like if he’d had a different childhood, if he hadn’t ended up at Lockland University, and/or if he hadn’t met Victor Vale.

As for Victor, we discover that Sydney’s EO ability to bring back the dead isn’t without consequences, and Victor’s time to find a permanent fix for his problem is running out. Here again this series questions the definitions of good and evil as Victor takes lives in in order to try and save his own. As much as you may want him to survive, you’ll probably also ask, but at what cost?

While Vengeful is still Victor and Eli’s story, new EO Marcella Riggins commands an equally powerful presence on the page. After her mobster husband Marcus’s failed attempt to kill her, Marcella wakes up in the hospital with the ability to reduce whatever she touches to dust and ashes. She also awakens, understandably, in a murderous mood towards Marcus. What begins as a thirst for revenge quickly escalates into an insatiable hunger for power. She teams up with two other EOs—Jonathan, who can shield himself as well as extend the shield to another person, and the mysterious June, who can take on someone else’s appearance—with a very interesting twist. Alone, Marcella and her destructive touch are formidable, but working with June and Jonathan, she seems unstoppable. Marcella puts the “Extra” in “ExtraOrdinary,” reveling in making a spectacle of everything she does. I do think her grandstanding slowed down the book’s pacing at times, making Vengeful not quite the feverish page turner that Vicious was.

Overall, though, Vengeful is a not to be missed sequel. Once again, Victoria Schwab takes the superhero story and flips it every way imaginable, creating an unpredictable, deliciously twisted tale that you won’t easily forget.

All in All: Although Vicious just edges this out as my favorite book in the duology, Vengeful is certainly not a sidekick of a sequel. These are some of the best flawed characters ever—perfectly imperfect and incredibly compelling to read about.

Review: 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.