Our Dark Duet Book Review (Monsters of Verity Book Two)

Novels don’t make me cry. I’ve gotten upset over many of them, but it has been a long time since I cried at the written word. Still, Our Dark Duet, by V.E. Schwab, about a monster preserving his humanity and a teenage girl trying to run down her monsters, almost got me.

It’s the panic infused into the writing that did it. Schwab doesn’t have a true time bomb (‘the world’s going to end in six days’ type of thing), and that almost makes it scarier, because the reader knows the sky is falling down, but they aren’t sure when.

The two separate character arcs are commendable. Even in a third person rotating point of view (where the reader follows multiple characters in third person), typically the ending converges into a single point. However, Schwab gives Kate and August, the two protagonists, their own final antagonist to face. Each has to battle their own demons and in doing so rediscover themselves.

The choice of syntax is profound. I’m a sucker for novels-in-verse (when the lines of prose are set up like poetry), so I enjoyed the Chaos Eater’s section. In addition, the introduction of Sloan as a point of view served both as a way to experience both sides of the city and as a distraction for the ending.

Of course, this series is nothing without its themes. Something incredible happens at the end that will leave readers thinking for days to come. Self-righteous Soro, a new monster, also leaves the reader pondering that line between good and bad, circumstance and nature, human and monster.

I almost wish it wasn’t a duology, so I’d have more to read!

Recommended for anyone ready to face their own darknesses.

--Grace Nask