Review – Vengeful

From Goodreads:

Magneto and Professor X. Superman and Lex Luthor. Victor Vale and Eli Ever. Sydney and Serena Clarke. Great partnerships, now soured on the vine.

But Marcella Riggins needs no one. Flush from her brush with death, she’s finally gained the control she’s always sought—and will use her new-found power to bring the city of Merit to its knees. She’ll do whatever it takes, collecting her own sidekicks, and leveraging the two most infamous EOs, Victor Vale and Eli Ever, against each other.

With Marcella’s rise, new enmities create opportunity–and the stage of Merit City will once again be set for a final, terrible reckoning.

Oh this is a difficult one to review as i did not dislike it but I did not love it. I definitely preferred Vicious. I think for me the plot for this one was not as clear cut and as impactful as vicious was.

Unlike Vicious I initially found the timeline jumping to be somewhat confusing in the first two sections of this book. It seemed to move in a non-linear fashion within the same characters timelines and I found myself often having to check exactly when these events were taking place. It wasn’t until we were building towards the end that time jumps became effective ramping up the tension the same way they had in Vicious.

I was also disappointed in the amount of time we spent with Victor and Eli. While I enjoyed the addition of new characters and that we got to explore Sydney’s story a bit more, Eli and Victor were somewhat static in this book and didn’t really shine. I think I am the only person that has not bought into the Marcella hype. I found her a somewhat stereotypical character. She just wasn’t exciting to me. Honestly I much preferred the introduction of June. June had that same quality that Victor had in Vicious where you were not quite sure what the underlying motive was and wither they would become a hero or fully accept their stance as villain. June’s power was also one of the most interesting in the book and it just made her more and more mysterious. I wanted to read more about her and her life.

The fact that we didn’t learn that much more about the world in this book was a little disappointing. It again just remained almost static from the first book despite 5 years having passed. Most of the new worldbuilding focused around Marcella and to me it was a lot of building for her to almost fizzle out. I just didn’t get any really pay off from her.

I will say the initial ending was fantastic. I did not see it coming and the building of time ramping up to it made it so tense. Then unfortunately we had the million other epilogue endings which gave it a bit of multiple ending syndrome.

Overall I did enjoy reading this books, it just wasn’t as good as Vicious and just didn’t have me captivated from start to finish.