1) This Savage Song ★★★

content warnings: violence, gore, manipulation, death, loss of a loved one
representation: side non-binary character, side mlm characters

Before writing this review, I checked to see what the ratings were and... apparently my opinion is very unpopular. Sorry guys, I genuinely don't get why this duology is so beloved ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There's nothing aggressively terrible about this book, the characters, plot, writing, settings, everything is fine, but that didn't stop me from being bored from the first page until the very end. I can't really put my finger on what was missing for me but this book just didn't click.

My main praise of the previous book was the characters and I still stand by that... sort of. Kate and August are good main characters, but as with many SFF books I read I found myself caring more about the major side characters than them.

Spoiler

This wasn't really helped by the weird out of nowhere and never brought up again kiss they had, something which turned me off a lot. The fact I didn't care about them that much meant that Kate's fate didn't effect me in the slightest.

Ilsa remained my favourite character,

Spoiler

making her fate the only moment when I felt genuinely emotional

, as did Henry. I also liked the addition of Soro (props to Victoria Schwab for including a character who uses they/them pronouns and is never misgendered), but literally every other side character who was introduced in this book I couldn't give two shits about.

Spoiler

Sloan having a POV annoyed me to no end as it almost always felt unnecessary and I groaned every time one of his chapters came up.

The plot was very meh for me, as with the last book. I'm not going to lie, towards the latter third I just straight-up started skimming because I wasn't enjoying it so I probably missed some pretty important stuff but I can't really bring myself to care.

The writing was good, but there was one thing that annoyed me almost as much as SJM's punctuation problem: the constant use of the word "kiss" in contexts where there was no actually kissing occurring. I didn't mark any of them down unfortunately, but there was a lot of talk of metal kissing Kate's spine and stuff like that.

The world building improved but I still feel like we only got a narrow view of the world as a whole and what was happening.

All in all, I don't really understand the hype around this duology other than the fact that Victoria Schwab wrote it. Don't worry, though, I'm still definitely planning on picking up both Vicious and Shades of Magic.