The Lowe family had always been the undisputed villains of their town’s ancient, bloodstained story, and no one understood that better than the Lowe brothers.
So before I begin the proper review, let me just:
JKFHGSKJDHL ASGDHJSF
Okay, I’m good.
Every generation, seven families send their teenaged champions to fight to the death in the Blood Mood tournament in hopes of controlling the rare resource of high magic. While common magic is readily available, the use of high magic is all but reserved for the family of the winner.
As the champions scramble to find sponsors who’ll help them craft spells and charms for that winning edge, families’ greed and prides cause them to make some fatal mistakes. And soon the champions find that there is more at stake than their own lives.
Tor was kind enough to send me an advance copy of All of Us Villains, a joint novel by Amanda Foody and Christine Lynn Herman. There was literally so much hype around this book; many of my friends over on Book Twitter were also raving about it weeks before the book was released.
Dystopian stories have kind of fallen out of style over the years — I was a teenager myself when The Hunger Games was released — but All of Us Villains makes a convincing case for the revival of the genre. The way the story combines this dystopian narrative with fantasy scratches an itch in my brain that I didn’t know was there.
With so many characters, it would be near impossible to focus on each champion without the book becoming an epic. Instead, the story follows just four of them, with the remaining three popping up in the others’ storylines. Sucks to be those three, I guess, but needs must. The main four have their own distinct narratives and arcs and it wasn’t difficult to tell them apart from each other, an issue that I tend to have in ensemble stories.
I actually really did love All of Us Villains apart from one fatal flaw in its storytelling — and here there is a minor spoiler — and that was there is a sequel. That is not typically a flaw in and of itself, but my main qualm with this book is that the authors were so excited to set up the sequel that the first book was left unfinished.
None of the characters’ arcs were finished by the last page; it was set up such that we were right after the story’s climax but I personally felt we were still in the early stages of everyone’s storyline. In fact, I was so stunned by the ending (I did kind of see it coming because I was keeping an eye on the page count) that I had to double check I didn’t receive a faulty copy.
Hence my earlier keyboard smashes.
Is All of Us Villains still a good book? Absolutely. Would it have been better had the authors just punished everything as a thousand-page novel? Personally, I would say yes, but some of you might enjoy the delayed gratification.
Nevertheless, I am so excited for the sequel and I’m crossing my fingers for a release date soon because if I do not get to find out what happens to Alistair I will personally fly to America and… cry.
Rating: 4/5
All of Us Villains by Amanda Foody and Christine Lynn Herman was released 9 Nov.