There’s no denying that V.E. Schwab is a great writer. She’s able to construct stories that entice you to keep reading despite the underlying story not being all it’s cracked up to be.

Her Villains duology leaves me feeling empty. She knows what the big moments she wants to have in her story are and she constantly steers her characters in the direction of those big moments without it feeling earned.

In Vicious, V. E. Schwab writes some great prose and hooks you with a lot of writing gimmicks (past, present and future POVs, extremely convenient circumstances/decisions to set up exciting scenes, etc.) but she struggles to create a believable narrative with likeable characters.

An absolute page turner if I’ve ever read one (I couldn’t put this book down). Each time I sat down to read, it only took a few sentences to transport me completely into this world that V.E. Schwab has so carefully built.

A Gathering of Shadows develops the characters introduced in the previous book (along with some fresh faces), portrays the evolution of their relationships with one another and sets everything up for what I’m confident is going to be a riveting conclusion to the trilogy.

It was an enjoyable romp but doesn’t necessarily hit the highs of the previous books in the series. As the third and final(ish) book in the series I was expecting something a little bit more. Or maybe I was expecting a little bit less, a more tightly edited and polished story. Either would have been nice.

I really loved it…

I was skeptical at first (I’ve been burned too many times by boring and tropey fantasy novels that so many people love) but V. E. Schwab reeled me in with some gritty and edgy fantasy that felt really “real” to me.

I was so immersed in the world that I was tearing up by the end of the book which doesn’t happen to me very often (one character’s arc really spoke to me)