I wish I could have skipped all chapters involving Marcella and her henchmen. She was written like a bad female villain from a Batman movie. Victor and Eli were still great characters. But meh sequel at best.

Oh man this was a great sequel! V E Schwab delivered, as per, and this one was worth the wait.

I loved the all new characters, especially June, who had a super interesting power set. I could easily read another book about her! Additionally, I loved her Schwab further explored the background of existing characters like Eli and Dominic, and really just developed the world of Vicious in every way. This world feels a lot more comic book-y (or mature graphic novel-y) now, and that’s great in my book. Overall, this was a gripping, fun and engaging read which was hard to put down!

Only negative things were the fact that the book juggled multiple perspectives and time periods simultaneously, which was a tad confusing at times. It was largely okay and Schwab’s excellent writing pretty much negated much of the issues this could cause, but piecing together the exact order of events was a bit of a head scratcher by the book’s end. Also, I felt the ending was abrupt in some ways. Some characters stories or endpoints were left too open (apparently she’s thinking about writing a third one so I guess this makes sense) - but Victor, Sydney, Mitch, June and Jonathan’s story’s just kinda stop. In fact Sydney’s arcs just kinda stop as well, which I felt was kinda weird. On the other had, Marcella, an excellent new character, is pretty much just sidelined and killed off to make way for the Eli/Victor fight, which also just kinda ends abruptly. For a book this long (575 pages) I wish Schwab had spent a little more time with Marcella and Eli’s last moments, made their deaths and final fights longer or more grand. Just seems a shame as now two brilliant antagonists have been written out of the story, and I feel that they both were underserved (more so Marcella). Finally, smaller characters, like Rios and Jonathan, could have been expanded on more, just because I thought they were cool and giving them more to do would have been nice. I mean we get like a few pages with Rios, find out she’s an EO right at the end, where she’s also killed, and that’s kinda it? (Yes there’s a really neat bonus at the end explaining her transformation into an EO and her time at EON but I really wish she got more time in the plot tbh)

My nit-picks aside though, this is a great books and an excellent follow up to Vicious. V E Schwab is one of my favourite writers and her take on superhero storylines are superb. Highly recommend.