This Savage Song Review

This week's novel is This Savage Song, young adult urban/dystopian fantasy by Victoria Schwab.  I read this one because I liked A Darker Shade of Magic so much that I figured I would delve into Schwab's other series.

In the mega-city of Verity, acts of violence create monsters and the city is divided between Harker, the mob-boss like ruler who keeps the monsters from attacking people who have paid for his protection, and Flynn, with his armed militia to fight back the monsters and his trio of Sunai, especially scary monsters who take the souls of sinners with their music.  Kate, Harker's daughter, wants to be ruthless as her father to earn his respect.  August, one of the Sunai, wants to be human.

The world building here happens in an oddly slow way.  The book starts with Kate burning down the chapel at her boarding school in the country because she wants to get thrown out and sent home.  It pulled me in without knowing that her father's a mob boss or that her home is crawling with monsters.  Those things you find out a little bit at a time.  You get to know August for a chapter or two without learning he's Sunai, just that he's confined to his apartment building and his dad and older brother are fighting monsters.  But the world building grows and grows: there is geography that's important, and there's the history of the fall of the United States and of the civil war inside Verity, and there are three different kinds of monsters who work and are created in different ways.  With every piece of world building we're fed, the situation changes a bit and there's a moment of readjustment.  Every so often it fells like the story drags as you wait for information, but on the whole it works to keep the focus on the characters.


I like both Kate and August, who react in reasonable ways and are fairly rational people.  They each have clear motivations and drives, but beneath that have layers of fears and vulnerabilities.

I also like the lack of a love story.  Kate and August grow to care for each other, but they don't acknowledge or act upon any romantic feelings.  They're friends.  They help each other because they like each other, not out of the expected obligation to bend over backwards for the person you make out with, and not because lust drove them to act. 

It was fun and I look forward to the sequel.

***
Next week: Spontaneous, contemporary YA with spontaneous combustion, by Aaron Starmer.