Victoria Schwab: Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity #2) | Lara
THE WORLD IS BREAKING. AND SO ARE THEY.
KATE HARKER isn't afraid of monsters. She hunts them. And she's good at it.
AUGUST FLYNN once yearned to be human. He has a part to play. And he will play it, no matter the cost.
THE WAR HAS BEGUN.
THE MONSTERS ARE WINNING.
Kate will have to return to Verity. August will have to let her back in. And a new monster is waiting—one that feeds on chaos and brings out its victims' inner demons.
Which will be harder to conquer: the monsters they face, or the monsters within?
“People were messy. They were defined not only by what they'd done, but by what they would have done, under different circumstances, molded as much by their regrets as their actions, choices they stood by and those they wished they could undo. Of course, there was no going back - time only moved forward - but people could change.
For worse.
And for better.
It wasn't easy. The world was complicated. Life was hard. And so often, living hurt.
So make it worth the pain.”
I’m still stuck and I can’t get out. I’m in a pocket between this world and the city of Verity, desperately holding on to the threads of music that still echo in my mind. It’s over. It’s over. Time to let go. My mind knows I should close the book, write my review and keep going, open a new world to fall in love into, but my heart is still out there, with August and Kate, wondering how can something be so beautiful yet hurt so much.
“There were two kinds of monsters, the kind that hunted the streets and the kind that lived in your head. She could fight the first, but the second was more dangerous. It was always, always, always a step ahead.”
This book ended as it began: with a turmoil of pain and fury, one-ended decisions that led to destruction and disorder, all in the hope to fix something that was broken a long time ago. When I read Schwab’s afterword, I saw a line that said: “From the moment I started writing the story about Kate and August, I knew it wasn’t going to be a happy one”, and I realized at that moment, I knew that too. That feeling, like an iron collar around my throat, was just a light pressure at the beginning, but as the story went and I felt the spiral of events tightening, building pressure slowly and painfully until I was left without a drop of air inside my lungs. There aren’t many things that can make me feel with such an urgent and painful intensity, but Schwab left me staring at the blank page for a long time, gathering the pieces of my thoughts.
Our Dark Duet picks up six months after the events at the end of This Savage Song. August and Kate killed Callum Harker, freeing the North from his influence and rule that benefited only the elite. But not for long. Sloan, Callum’s right hand and strongest Malachai, survived after the fight at the Waste and has taken the lead of the monsters in the North. The treaty is broken, monsters are loose and free to kill humans as much as they want and everyone who survived is escaping to the South, where Henry Flynn is holding the last line of resistance. People are either risking their lives to flee the city or dying in massacres and Malachai bloodlust.
Katherine fled Verity, leaving her past and her old life behind, but as it seems, it doesn’t want to leave her. Hunting monsters in Prosperity, she found a new family, but she also found something else – a new kind of monster. A shadow without a body, a monster that feeds on disarray, throwing everyone who sees him in a pit of chaos and violence, and causing slaughter and mayhem without lifting a hand. Kate must stop it, but for that, she needs to follow it – and where else would it go but Verity, the city of pain.
“I’m willing to walk in darkness if it keeps humans in the light.”
I can’t even describe how much I enjoyed reading this book, a fantasy world caught in a war between the militaristic community on one side and a pack of bloodthirsty monsters at the other. I was caught in a dynamic stream of action and didn’t emerge until the very end when I realized how quickly it all passed. My heart broke endless times during the read, not only because it was sad, but because I knew It wasn’t going to have a happy ending. It is better to have happiness taken from you than living with the knowledge you were never meant to have it.
I will miss August and Kate with all my heart. Such extraordinary characters, so different, yet the same when it comes to things that matter. They both wanted to fight monsters, but they didn’t realize they have been fighting monsters inside themselves all along. They were never supposed to belong, yet Kate found her way to the light despite the monster her father tried to turn her in, and August learned to love the part of himself he always despised and wanted to get rid of. They saved each themselves as well as they saved each other – true soulmates.
I already miss them.
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