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Book: Vicious
Author: V.E. Schwab
Publication date: January 20, 2015

 

Plot: Vicious follows Victor Vale, an ex-con with ExtraOrdinary abilities looking to get revenge on his college roommate, Eli Cardale, for something that happened when they were still in college. The book is split between two timelines: the present, when Victor has just gotten out of jail, and ten years into the past, when Victor and Eli were still friends and trying to discover a way to gain ExtraOrdinary abilities.

Plot is always tricky for me to talk about when it comes to V.E. Schwab’s books. All of her books have a clear plot, but the characters are always the main focus. This can be a good thing but with Schwab’s books, I always feel detached from the plot despite it being right there. Something that I found interesting is that at first it felt like the main storyline took place in the past but, as the book goes on, the present overtakes the plot and becomes the main storyline.

Characters: The characters were interesting because none of them were either completely good or completely evil. All of them did bad things, and one of them thought he was the only good person out of all of the characters — but he was the one causing the most damage and pain.

Although I didn’t love any of the characters, the author succeeded at making me feel what the main character was feeling. Near the beginning, Victor was friends with Eli. He admired him, though there was a lot of bitterness and jealousy involved. I didn’t care about Eli but while Victor did care about him, I felt as though I was a little bit in love with and hated Eli a little bit at the same time. However, when Victor’s feelings for Eli were simplified into just hatred, all I felt for Eli was dislike. The way the author achieved that is great, in my opinion. I tend to be indifferent to characters all of the time, so it was fun to like and dislike Eli throughout the book.

Ultimately, I really enjoyed Vicious, though I did feel like there was something missing. Vicious is getting a sequel, Vengeful, later this year, which is bound to be even better than the first book.