Monday, December 10, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Fury by Rachel Vincent




Fury is the conclusion of Rachel Vincent's urban fantasy "Menagerie" trilogy, which began with the interesting Menagerie (Review Here) and the completely unnecessary Spectacle (Review Here).  I mean that last bit for real by the way - Spectacle is not worth anyone's time and if you were interested in Menagerie, I'd recommend skipping straight to Fury and getting a one paragraph spoiler of Spectacle rather than wasting your time with that book (I'll provide that paragraph after the jump).  Fury finally deals with the questions posed by the background given in Menagerie, the issue of the mysterious "Surrogates" who 30 years prior caused parents across the United States to murder all of their children while they slept.

It's....a mixed bag honestly.  The book is definitely different from its predecessors - our heroes are on the run not in captivity dealing with the threats of humans to cryptids, and the story is split into two points of view rather than multiple, so it's a more refreshing read for sure.  And the main heroine remains a strong lead, as do some of the other secondary characters.  Still, certain events that are treated as a mystery by the protagonists for large parts of the book are fairly obvious to the reader from the beginning, which is annoying and the result is a book that seems to stand still for a bit too long before moving in the direction the reader will probably have expected right all along.  There was a lot more promise in the setup made in Menagerie I think that isn't met here, and the result is solid but unremarkable.


Previously in this series in Spectacle:  Delilah Marlowe and her Cryptid friends, having taken over the menagerie, are discovered and recaptured by the Savage Spectacle.  The Spectacle displays cryptids to private customers and allows them to satisfy their desires for money, using state of the art collars to control the Cryptid prisoners.  A sick customer forces Delilah to have sex with her protector, the redcap Gallagher, and she becomes pregnant, although Delilah has a cryptid erase her memory of the event.  In the end, Delilah and Gallagher manage to get to the collar control room, shut down the collars, kill their jailors, and escape with most of their friends, although they are forced to go on the run.  That's about all you need to know from that book.

---------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
On August 24, 1986, a tragedy struck the United States:  The Reaping.  On that night, every parent with a child born in March of 1980 in the US went and murdered their other children in their sleep.  It soon became clear that none of the "children" from March 1980 were actually human (or the actual children birthed by the parents) and they - known later on as "surrogates" - had caused the parents to commit the acts of mass murder.  These surrogates were then round up by the government and taken to an unknown facility and the people in fear turned on their Cryptid neighbors and blamed them despite their innocence.

Rebecca Essig was one of the few survivors of the Reaping, from having not been at home when her "sister" Erica caused her parents to murder her other two siblings.  Unwilling to accept that her real sister is lost, she takes desperate actions which will change the course of destiny.

In the present day, Delilah Marlowe and her cryptid allies remain on the run after their escape from the Savage Spectacle, with their names well known to the news.  Delilah's pregnancy is in its eleventh month, due to the extra long gestation period of a fae baby, and it's not helping their constant attempts to stay free and to potentially find their lost families.  But the world will not wait for Delilah's child to come and things are happening: suddenly humans are committing acts of mass murder for no reason as if a second reaping is occurring.....and only Delilah's powers could possibly save everyone from another catastrophe.
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Again the best part of this trilogy has been Delilah Marlowe, whose growth and development from the beginning has made her a very different character from when she began.  Our first book's Delilah was hopelessly naive at times, and even at the end of that book she was a little naive about how bad things were for her friends.  At this point, all of that naivete is gone, and Delilah is no longer making comments and/or taking actions that require her to backtrack due to the looks of those around her, and her maturity makes it very easy to care about her.  Particularly due to the precarious situation she's in - pregnant and on the run from the law, with people who are very conspicuous and nowhere to go, even before things start getting hectic again.  And the relationship between her and her friends, as well as with Gallagher, feels very natural and is a nice way to finish off this series.

The book also spends about 40% of its page-time telling the past story of one "Rebecca Essig," whose significance takes a while to become apparent.  Still, previously our understanding of the events of the Reaping and how Cryptids became non-peopled was told only through small quotes in the first book, and this more detailed story does provide much welcomed background information.  It's a welcome relief from the quotes from the first two books, which got a little old by the end of the first book.  And while the plot isn't great (for reasons I'll detail in a second), it's a breath of fresh air by being different from the prior two books, making it actually interesting to read this time.

The major issue with this book is basically just how predictable things are.  The main characters spend an awful lot of time trying to figure out what's going on and the reader will figure it out far far sooner, leading to a lot of frustration.  Similarly, the solution to the climax seems rather obvious well before the heroine figures out what to do, which is again frustrating.  And while this story does serve as an end to all the plot threads introduced in the earlier books, the question of "Why" some of those threads occurs remains unanswered and well, given what we know about human nature, it kind of feels a bit like too neat an ending.

In short, I wouldn't recommend the Menagerie trilogy really to anyone looking for urban fantasy, as only the first book fulfills its own promise to any degree, and even then it's not particularly remarkable.  But Fury is a recovery from the bad misstep that is the second book in this series, so there's that.


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