V.E. Schwab's The Monsters of Verity
Truth be told, I read this excellent duology between reading Vicious and Vengeful. After finishing the first Villains novel, and having fallen in love with her writing in the process, I immediately went through a period of "Schwab Withdrawal." I wanted and needed--had a jonesing for, if you will--another Schwab novel. (It's the same feeling, I imagine, that my mother goes through when she finishes her latest James Patterson book).
Having read some of her adult work though, I wanted to experience something a little different. I knew that she wrote works both in the broad genres of "YA" and "Middle-Grade," so I figured I should check something in one of those categories out. I spun the roulette wheel of options, and it came up Monsters of Verity.
Having enjoyed her other work, I figured I would enjoy this, so I just bought both books straight out of the gate. The only preconceptions I had about these books came from Schwab herself, in an interview she gave in the UK. (See below for that). Besides her descriptions of it, I was fully open to the literary experience.
I have to say that I loved this series. The prose is again magnificent. A great hallmark of Schwab's style is that, even when she's telling an exciting action packed story, she never flags on the sentence level. She has, simply (and to couch it in a complete cliché) a wonderful way with words.
The best example of this is of course her playground rhyme about the Monsters of Verity, with each creature type getting its own stanza:
Monsters, monsters, big and small,
They're gonna come and eat you all.
Corsai, Corsai, tooth and claw,
Shadow and bone will eat you raw.
Malchai, Malchai, sharp and sly,
Smile and bite and drink you dry.
Sunai, Sunai, eyes like coal,
Sing you a song and steal your soul.
Monsters, monsters, big and small,
They're gonna come and eat you all!
It's a haunting bit of verse, yet, she manages to cast it in that same rhythm and rhyme you find in something like Humpty Dumpty or Jack and Jill.
She also has he great facility for conveying details that are not only visual, but also audible. Onomatopoeic language recurs through he work, adding to rhythmic sense of her sentences. They work almost like the volume and tempo markings in music. At times, forte, staccato, presto, and allegro, other times, piano, andante, and adagio.
In addition, the other great thing about this series is Schwab's incredible ability to make her viewpoint characters so distinct in their personalities. Our two main characters are Kate Harker, the daughter of one of the series' central antagonists, who initially wants nothing more than to be her father's daughter, and August Flynn, a human-like masculine-presenting entity known as a Sunai, a monster born of a mass atrocity. It could've been so easy for Schwab to stick these two characters into classic molds of YA characters. But she's too good for that.
These two could not be more different. Obviously, one is a human and one is a monster, but there's more to them than that, and that's what I'm talking about.
Kate is a seemingly cold, calculating young woman, brimming with ambition (a trait I've found in many Schwab women), who plays things close to the chest. That being said, she isn't without a moral center or emotions. If anything, in the world she lives in on her side of V-City's great wall, she's the most morally conscious characters But she hides them well. At least until she meets August.
August, however, is the opposite. He's a very emotional, pained character, who is far more feeling conscious than his female counterpart. He's also a conflicted character, constantly at odds with his own nature. He's a monster, and he knows it. And he hates it. He'd much rather be human. Yet, he's fully aware that he can never become a human, which only pains him more. This emotionally attune sort of male character is, again, another Schwab hallmark of note. For someone like me, who wasn't really about to see himself in many of the more macho male characters of the literature I read, I immediately came to identify with August. Had this book been around when I was in high school, available for me to read then, I probably would've adored it as much as I did Harry Potter.
What's more is that Schwab establishes each character in this way in the first volume (Savage Song), but then, she flips the board, which each character undergoing a total transformation by the start of Dark Duet. Kate, to a degree, softens, mainly because of her interactions with August, the very human monster. Whereas August, withdraws and becomes more distant, because he concludes that, no matter what, he'll never be human--thus, he embraces the monster in him, even though doing so still pains him.
This complexity and nuance of character, plus the loveliness of the language, of course, are only the tip of the iceberg that is The Monsters of Verity. It's a story with a bittersweet conclusion, but it leaves the world itself open for the possibility of greater exploration. Whether or not Schwab does so will be up to her own creative discretion. I personally hope she does. From the few glimpses we got of the wider world beyond V-City in Dark Duet, there is much more to this world than she's shown us thus far.
Having read some of her adult work though, I wanted to experience something a little different. I knew that she wrote works both in the broad genres of "YA" and "Middle-Grade," so I figured I should check something in one of those categories out. I spun the roulette wheel of options, and it came up Monsters of Verity.
Having enjoyed her other work, I figured I would enjoy this, so I just bought both books straight out of the gate. The only preconceptions I had about these books came from Schwab herself, in an interview she gave in the UK. (See below for that). Besides her descriptions of it, I was fully open to the literary experience.
I have to say that I loved this series. The prose is again magnificent. A great hallmark of Schwab's style is that, even when she's telling an exciting action packed story, she never flags on the sentence level. She has, simply (and to couch it in a complete cliché) a wonderful way with words.
The best example of this is of course her playground rhyme about the Monsters of Verity, with each creature type getting its own stanza:
Monsters, monsters, big and small,
They're gonna come and eat you all.
Corsai, Corsai, tooth and claw,
Shadow and bone will eat you raw.
Malchai, Malchai, sharp and sly,
Smile and bite and drink you dry.
Sunai, Sunai, eyes like coal,
Sing you a song and steal your soul.
Monsters, monsters, big and small,
They're gonna come and eat you all!
It's a haunting bit of verse, yet, she manages to cast it in that same rhythm and rhyme you find in something like Humpty Dumpty or Jack and Jill.
She also has he great facility for conveying details that are not only visual, but also audible. Onomatopoeic language recurs through he work, adding to rhythmic sense of her sentences. They work almost like the volume and tempo markings in music. At times, forte, staccato, presto, and allegro, other times, piano, andante, and adagio.
In addition, the other great thing about this series is Schwab's incredible ability to make her viewpoint characters so distinct in their personalities. Our two main characters are Kate Harker, the daughter of one of the series' central antagonists, who initially wants nothing more than to be her father's daughter, and August Flynn, a human-like masculine-presenting entity known as a Sunai, a monster born of a mass atrocity. It could've been so easy for Schwab to stick these two characters into classic molds of YA characters. But she's too good for that.
These two could not be more different. Obviously, one is a human and one is a monster, but there's more to them than that, and that's what I'm talking about.
Kate is a seemingly cold, calculating young woman, brimming with ambition (a trait I've found in many Schwab women), who plays things close to the chest. That being said, she isn't without a moral center or emotions. If anything, in the world she lives in on her side of V-City's great wall, she's the most morally conscious characters But she hides them well. At least until she meets August.
August, however, is the opposite. He's a very emotional, pained character, who is far more feeling conscious than his female counterpart. He's also a conflicted character, constantly at odds with his own nature. He's a monster, and he knows it. And he hates it. He'd much rather be human. Yet, he's fully aware that he can never become a human, which only pains him more. This emotionally attune sort of male character is, again, another Schwab hallmark of note. For someone like me, who wasn't really about to see himself in many of the more macho male characters of the literature I read, I immediately came to identify with August. Had this book been around when I was in high school, available for me to read then, I probably would've adored it as much as I did Harry Potter.
What's more is that Schwab establishes each character in this way in the first volume (Savage Song), but then, she flips the board, which each character undergoing a total transformation by the start of Dark Duet. Kate, to a degree, softens, mainly because of her interactions with August, the very human monster. Whereas August, withdraws and becomes more distant, because he concludes that, no matter what, he'll never be human--thus, he embraces the monster in him, even though doing so still pains him.
This complexity and nuance of character, plus the loveliness of the language, of course, are only the tip of the iceberg that is The Monsters of Verity. It's a story with a bittersweet conclusion, but it leaves the world itself open for the possibility of greater exploration. Whether or not Schwab does so will be up to her own creative discretion. I personally hope she does. From the few glimpses we got of the wider world beyond V-City in Dark Duet, there is much more to this world than she's shown us thus far.
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