Review: Our Dark Duet

Our Dark Duet by Victoria Schwab
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hmm. Strange. I just read a Victoria Schwab book and I didn't love it like everyone else. I wasn't super-duper-hella-overwhelmed with feels. Did I read it wrong? Perhaps. Maybe in a year or so I'll read Our Dark Duet again and appreciate it more. But for now, I have to consider this one seriously hype-damaged.

Don't get me wrong, I did like the book. I just feel that there were a few certain things lacking in it. Like the world map I was really hoping for after one of my chief complaints about This Savage Song was that it didn't have one - and there still isn't one, which is a shame considering this is to be the end of the series. (More than ever, I have to lament the current trend towards YA duologies - it often feels like they should either be one book, or they should continue the story into at least a third book, but two always feels a little...off...to me for some reason.) Though there's no doubt that TSS and ODD are most certainly not one book stretched out to two, this book itself felt like quite the stretch - 500+ pages, comparable to King's Cage, but only in terms of page count. In terms of content, not so much. Especially not when we were in Kate's POV, where there were quite a few interludes of poetry in this sort of staccato style with maybe two or three words per line. Nothing wrong with poetry, but the way it's laid out creates a TON of negative space, which I think may have increased the page count more than it should have.

That negative space being part of Kate's POV made me dread it even more than I did in the first book. I know, Schwab's said that Kate was one of those characters who was a study in How To Write An Engaging But Unlikable Protagonist, not unlike the leads from Vicious, but it doesn't make it any easier for me to read Kate's POV. And as for August, well, as much as I love him (especially with the interpretation of him being a metaphor for autistic people in mind, because he mirrors me too much, especially with his constant watching of other people's interactions, for it to be a coincidence), his POV ain't a walk in the park either this time around, not when he's decided to grit his teeth and embrace his darkness rather than be the smol cinnamon roll human we all know he truly is. (Though there's a few wonderful moments where Kate, of all people, calls him out on this and tries to remind him of his old goals.)

Overall, this book actually doesn't do as much as it should with building on its predecessor's fantasy-dystopian style. The world gets bigger and more complicated, especially with the addition of a new species of monster, and there's a ton of action to go around, of course. Though that action has a way of ratcheting up to such a point that it turns into Zack Snyder-esque hellfire and white noise at times, and that doesn't balance too well with the aforementioned negative space. It makes reading this book, for me, oddly toxic, like I'm a little too much in August's mindset when he's having an...episode. But the story builds to its conclusion pretty beautifully all the same, especially in the feels department (even managing to introduce some romance after the first book held off on it.) And that ending could've been worse. Let's just say if Schwab had gone to a certain other extreme, I'd be inconsolable.

Though I'm not as on board with this book as I hoped I would be, I'm at least happy that Schwab wrote it for us, and that hopefully now that she's done with this series and with the Shades of Magic trilogy, she can really concentrate her efforts on those Vicious and The Archived sequels I really, desperately need.

But to This Savage Song and Our Dark Duet and all the monsters of Verity (and of course Kate and August), vas ir...anoshe.

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