Vengeful ©2018 by V.E. Schwab is the second in a two-book series themed villains. I am a fan of the author V.E. Schwab. When I reviewed the first book Vicious ©2013 in my post for 8/14/2024, I eagerly awarded it five stars.
[Vicious] was nasty, vindictive, and full of misguided motives — all reasons it should have been disturbing to read — but it was a real page turner for me.Unfortunately my opinion of Vengeful is far less favorable. There were too many new characters and a myriad of location changes. Tens of timelines, inconsistently measured in weeks or days or hour or years and jumping about in seeming randomness, were confusing. Guidance for writing dual timelines is that each should be as interesting as the other to keep the reader engaged in both storylines. Rather than urging me on to see what comes next, I finally had to ignore the time jumps just to get through the book. Had this not been a library book I would have been sorely tempting to tear the pages apart and put them in chronological order and sub-sort by character groups. What a disappointing hodgepodge! Even if ordered chronologically, I felt the uneven character development and the non-existent path for their growth were severely lacking.
The overarching plot is that EOs, people who possess Extra Ordinary power due to having been revived from the dead, are hunted by other EO's and the government to methodically eradicate them as evil or scientifically study them as specimens. Victor, Eli, Sydney and Mitch reprise from the first book. It is Sydney and Mitch I would have liked to see morphed and brought to a resolution but I was left hanging. Instead too much focus was placed on other new villains like Marcella and a mad scientist who were very flat, boring, nasty, and hateful. One redeeming line from the book is this quote from Douglas Horton.
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