Book Review: Vengeful (Villains #2) by V.E. Schwab

Book: Vengeful
Series: Villains book 2
Author: V.E. Schwab
Genre: Adult fantasy/sci-fi

Eli Ever and Victor Vale were only medical students when their mutual discovery that near-death experiences can, under the right conditions, manifest extraordinary abilities. 

They were best friends, and rivals, and then enemies. They were dead, then alive, and then---Eli killed Victor, once and for all. 

Or so he thought---but Sydney Clarke felt otherwise, and used her own superpower to tip the scales. Now, a trio hides in the shadows, while another takes advantages of post-death life to take over the city of Merit. 

If there can be life after death—will there be calm after vengeance, or will chaos rule?

My Rating: 2 STARS

My Review:

I enjoyed Vicious a lot so I was shocked at how much I ended up disliking Vengeful.

Vengeful felt like a completely different story to Vicious.  Vicious centred on Eli and Victor and their interestingly twisted relationship with each other and I really wanted to read more about that but instead in Vengeful the story was not centred on them but on new characters.  I felt most of the story focused on these new characters and I didn't feel connected to them so I didn't care about most of the book.

I didn't like Marcella's character but as I was reading I thought that there must be more to this character for her to be built up in such a way, I thought she must link up to the original characters or storyline.  And although her character did cross paths with the others it wasn't in the way I was expecting because there was really no ultimate reasoning behind why her character was built up.

I also felt that the characters were a shell of themselves.  Victor and Eli didn't feel like the quirky characters they did in Vicious and Sydney seemed like a different character all together, becoming much more dependant and in need of reassurance.

Overall I wish I had have known some of these things before reading Vengeful.  I was very disappointed in this book and I felt like it didn't keep the same interesting quirky feeling as the first book had.