The Bad Ones took too long to rev its engine and never really recovered, in my opinion. It felt like instead of three acts, it had just two very long acts: the very slow one where almost nothing happens and I felt like I should just DNF the book and the moderately paced one where action picks up but it still wasn’t compelling enough for me to call this a great novel. 

The sad thing is Melissa Albert’s writing is stunning. She has great style. Her prose is full of fantastic word choices and lovely sentence structure. The passages in this book covering Nora’s (the protagonist) inner narrative were some of the only redeeming parts of this book because of how stunning and imaginative the writing was. Where it all fell apart for me was in the pacing and plotting of the story. It’s not that the story wasn’t interesting–it simply wasn’t interesting as presented in this book. It had all of my favorite hallmarks of a great YA supernatural horror-fantasy but with none of the panache. 

So I’m giving it three stars for a very mixed review with very mixed feelings. 

I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. This review has received a rating of three stars or lower so it will not be posted on my social media sites.