SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: All of Us Villains by Amanda Foody and Christine Lynn Herman: https://t.co/A3RJhnfyfm
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) November 4, 2021
Short Review: 6.5 out of 10
1/3
Short Review (cont): For Generations, 7 magical families have sent a champion into a secret deadly tourney - to possess powerful High Magick. But when the tourney is exposed, the new champions will find they may not want to be the villains theyre meant to be. Fine but eh
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) November 4, 2021
2/3
Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on November 9, 2021 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.
All of Us Villains is a Young Adult Fantasy novel, the first half of a duology, from authors Amanda Foody and Christine Lynn Herman. It's a book that will be reminiscent of a lot of other works for frequent readers, with elements of classic YA standouts in The Hunger Games/Battle Royale (a bunch of teens are forced into a competition to kill each other) while also featuring elements that reminded me of Kat Howard's adult work, An Unkindness of Magicians. So it's a book attempting to cover pretty familiar territory, which gives it a high bar to clear.
And well, All of Us Villains is fine, but it doesn't quite do anything particularly unique or interesting, and it suffers from a bizarre choice of ending that make it feel like the book is one half of a book just cut in two. The four main characters are decently well done and enjoyable, as is the magic-based world: where a more powerful special magic is only available to one of seven families who wins a cursed battle to the death every so often, where the champions are teens who have their own relationships and reasons not to want to kill or to die, etc. And the prose reads decently well so as to make it never seem slow or unenjoyable. But the book just doesn't do anything to distinguish itself, and that ending is just incredibly unsatisfying.
---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
For years, the world though High Magick was a thing of the past - a magic far more powerful than the common magick everyone else wielded, one that had helped kingdoms rise and fall. But in the city of Ilvermath, to a few families and assorted others, it is known that High Magick still exists: in the hands of one of seven magically-talented families, who battle ever generation in a cursed tournament for the right to control this resource for the next few years....a battle, that is always to the death. It's a tournament that has always been secret....until this year, when someone released a tell-all book exposing its existence to the world.
Suddenly the seven families find themselves celebrities, and everyone wants a piece of the contest and the high magick that is its prize. But for the teens who would be champions, the tournament is their darkest fear - where they will be forced to kill their friends, or more likely be killed themselves. It's an event where their families will try to make them into monsters and do unspeakable things, and those who seemingly have no chance will do anything for the chance to survive.
And it's a cursed event that some will want, for the first time, to change, and to end it once and for all. But when ending the cursed tournament will require cooperation from those who will otherwise be better off killing you, is it really even possible?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All of Us Villains has a setup that's fairly well done. You have a world where common magick isn't unknown, and people can craft spells into items they can then use common magick to cast, at various levels of difficulty and power (with more powerful spells and curses requiring greater sacrifice to perform). There's high magick, which lets your spells be extra powerful and thus is incredibly valuable, and so the idea of a bunch of families squabbling over it all makes a lot of sense, even if it's not an original idea. And then it throws a loop it all by making the whole tournament exposed to the paparazzi and the world, forcing the horrors of a tournament of teens killing each other into the light, and exposing our teenage protagonists to celebrity and pressure like never before.
The book focuses on four of the seven champions, for better or worse - it does make it clear that the three other teens aren't likely to survive this story, or else we'd actually see scenes from their own points of view. First there's Alistair Lowe, the latest expected champion from the family who usually wins the tournament, and who are known to be evil monsters....but really doesn't have the heart to be the monster his family wants of him. Then there's Isobel Macaslan, the girl who didn't want to be a champion but was forced into it by the actions of others, for whom betrayal has left her without hope, resulting in her desperately trying to win even as she starts to develop feelings for one other champion. There's Briony Thorburn, the girl who wanted desperately to be champion only to be denied, and who realizes now what being champion would do to others, so she selfishly tries to find a way to destroy the tourney. And then there's Gavin Grieve, the boy from the family expected to lose immediately, who makes a deal with the devil to obtain the power to possibly win...only to realize the power isn't what he expected, and neither is his own feelings. The quarter are all messy in their emotions and relationships, whether that be in friendships, romances, or whatever but well they're teens, so that makes a lot of sense.
The thing is that while they're all well done, none of them are anything that really transcend the archetypes they're fit into, and they all feel very done before. And that's also true with the rest of the plot, as things develop, and we have alliances form, all in ways that well...will feel like many another book before it. And there's one character who's an obvious antagonist from the beginning, who the book tries to act like it's a surprise near the end when it's finally revealed (and several characters clearly are near figuring it out midway through but never come to that final conclusion), which just doesn't really work.
And then there's this book's ending which....there's a trend in YA at the moment towards duologies, and so many of them feel like someone decided to chop a book in half and sell it twice, without any concern as to whether that first book is satisfying on its own. And that's exactly what happens here, where the ending is less a series of cliffhangers and more just a "stop" right as characters finally realize what's going on and make choices - and well those are the moments that you want to carry your book, they shouldn't be your cliffhangers...but they are here. It's what takes a fine if unremarkable piece of YA fantasy and really makes it hard to recommend, because no one is going to be satisfied with just this book. Alas.
No comments:
Post a Comment