Vicious Review

In 2020 I read the first two books in V. E. Schwab’s Darker Shades series, as well as The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, and loved them all, so I decided to branch out and read Vicious (I am still on the waiting list for A Conjuring of Light, being very “patient,”). It took me a while to get into this story, as the first half was a little slow. It really picked up in the second half, though, and I enjoyed the suspense and the ending.

Others have described this as a “dark academia” story, but I do not agree. The very beginning of the narrative arc is set at an institution of learning, but the setting quickly moves on. In addition, apart from the original science experiment being part of a graduate thesis, the focus is not on academic work or the stressors of an academic environment. Vicious is a revenge story that starts from a betrayal at a university. If “partly set at a university” is a solid criterion for being classed as dark academia, then the His Dark Materials series would also fall into that class, but HDM definitely does not, and neither does Vicious. I am sure I will expand all my Official Thoughts™ on the dark academia genre in the future, so I will leave it here for now.

The characters of Eli and Victor are well-rounded and Schwab has explored the depths of their personalities and motives. As it is a revenge narrative, neither of them exhibit much growth in the “now” timeline of their stories, but we do get to see growth (or at least what they see as growth) in their younger selves. Sydney and Serena are given much less depth and we do not get to explore either of their motivations much at all, which is a shame because they both have such potential. The arc of their relationship was something I was very interested in hearing more about, but it did not happen for me in this book. I hope to see more of their machinations in Vengeful. Most of all, I think Dol the dog should have a staring role.