City News

                V.E. Schwab is back, and with another amazing series! I have already read her other series, A Darker Shade of Magic and its accompaniments, and as a result, I knew this series would be excellent. Vicious and Vengeful certainly did not disappoint; I read both books in a few days because of how excited I was to read them!

                Victor and Eli are the protagonists of Vicious, the first book in the series. The two first met when they became college roommates and realized they had a lot in common: intelligence, ambition, and loneliness. For their senior thesis, they choose to research the possibility of extraordinary powers, and how one could obtain them. Eventually, Eli wants to try it for himself, and unbelievably, it works. After nearly dying in an ice bath, he develops the ability to regenerate when he is injured. Victor is jealous of his success, and sets off to gets powers of his own. Victors gains the power to control how much pain a person feels, but Eli’s girlfriend who had helped Victor dies in the process, and Victor is ultimately sent to jail after he fights Eli. Ten years pass, and Victor breaks out of prison along with his cellmate, and begins his plan for revenge on Eli. At the same time, Eli has taken his survival to mean that God has willed him to find a new purpose, so he begins killing every other EO he can manage to track down. He believes that extraordinaries are all damaged, that EOs return with something missing, and that he is the exception to the rule. Victor eventually catches up to Eli, and the ensuing fight is one to remember.

                In the second and final installment in the Villains series, more extraordinaries are introduced, and they all have plans of their own to achieve. Marcella is the wife of a powerful mafia leader, but she is tired of constantly being reduced to her looks; she wants power, and when her husband tries to kill her after she confronts him for being unfaithful, she gets it. She possesses the power to make things decay, and uses it to get revenge on her husband and the men who had previously scorned her. After this, she collects a team of powerful EOs, and then plans an elaborate scheme to take control of the city. Meanwhile, Victor keeps dying; after being resurrected by Sydney, his loyal sidekick, he finds that he starts dropping dead, and stays dead for longer and longer intervals. Victor then begins tracking down EOs in hopes of finding one who can fix him, and when they can’t, he kills them. Despite being in captivity, Eli is allowed to help his captors with their cases involving EOs, and Eli is able to deduce that Victor is behind this string of murders. The story progresses alongside Marcella’s plans, and things come to a climax when she hosts her marvelous party as a means to introduce herself and become the most powerful person in the city.

                As was the case for Schwab’s other series, I loved the underlying concept of the book; in this case, it was the ability to gain extraordinary powers by experiencing a near-death event and struggling to stay alive. I also really enjoyed how the characters were not either good or bad; Eli, for example, was a perfect example of a character that is deceptively charming and becomes evil despite being the story’s “hero". 

                My only complaint about this series is that I feel that it would have been better if Vicious was a stand-alone novel. The second book’s plot is different enough from the first’s to the point where it doesn’t feel like a natural continuation of the first book. The new characters in Vengeful were excellent though; Marcella’s character is seductive and charming, and June was a great anti-hero. Marcella almost seemed cartoonish in how she relished in attention and power, but that was what made her so fun. The trade-off was that Eli and Victor seemed less important and I felt that their dynamic was what made the first book so wonderful. Regardless, I loved these books, and I am glad V.E. Schwab wrote another amazing series. 

                To conclude, I would certainly recommend this author to anyone who is interested in fantastic fantasy novels, and even to those who don’t! Her series are so amazing that I honestly feel that regardless of your taste in novels, they will appeal to you. Her characters are extremely unique and the pacing of her books is perfect so that you are pulled into the adventures along with them. 

Check out Vicious and Vengeful at the Newport Beach Public Library.