The Collective was a mostly good read and not super predictable which I enjoyed. It centered around grief and bitterness that turns into revenge and vigilante justice, and how there is always a price to pay when that monster is fed.

Initially the first part of it felt a fairly uncomfortable for me - just kind of that feeling of looking at something ugly and hoping someone was going to name it for what it was but afraid they wouldn’t. It was throwing a fair amount of validity and justification on getting vengeance and feeding hate, as if it was going to fix everything when justice wasn’t served and grief felt helpless, taking it into your own hands.

But by the end the book, it started to shed light on the fact that there was sometimes more to a story than black and white, right and wrong. I don’t know that it did a ton of this to be honest but it at least touched on it, how life isn’t that simple and you can end up in this never ending black hole when one step leads to another you can’t get out of it. That you can always look at someone else as the offender without giving a second thought to how you cause an offense, and in condemning someone else this way, you condemn yourself. In the end it still felt a little skeevy to me in the vague ethics of it all though.

I can’t say it was favorite and still left a lot open to interpretation on the morality of vengeance, justice, bitterness, and hatred. But as a book and story in and of itself it was a pretty good story line.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.