RaveDen of GeekNarratively, The Ruin of Kings has everything you could want from a fantasy epic ... author Jenn Lyons weaves the tale beautifully, parsing out narrative information at a masterful pace through the story\'s cleverly-structured frame tale .... The story is tightly-plotted with a rich setting that expands off of the pages and beyond the narrative, but this book is rarely intimidating ... Near the end of the 560-page story, the twists and turns involving the many, often similarly-named characters can get a bit confusing and expository ... For the most part, Lyons does a fantastic job of leading the reader through a dense plot, making The Ruin of Kings a supremely-accessible epic fantasy experience that doesn\'t sacrifice moral ambiguity, structural creativity, or textured worldbuilding in the process.
Charlie Jane Anders
PositiveDen of GeekAnders dares to imagine something different, a better way forward. This is not to say the book does not include tragedy, trauma, pain, or devastation—the repercussions of systemic violence enacted and inflicted is a continuous, intrinsically-exhausting theme. This book is, often, a downer. But it explores what healing looks like, too—both for the individual and for the community. It champions something strange, new, and much more inclusive in the place of what its human characters know. It recognizes that change is terrifying, yes, but that the alternative is far worse.
V. E. Schwab
RaveDen of GeekVengeful picks up five years after the events of Vicious, and those years have not been kind to this world\'s central characters. Victor is suffering from the increasingly-serious side effects of having been brought back from the proper dead. Eli has been locked inside of a cell at ExtraOrdinary Observation and Neutralization (EON), an organization set up to catch and contain EOs. Sydney is struggling with her part in Victor\'s condition, as well as the isolation that comes from being an 18-year-old stuck in a 13-year-old girl\'s body ... Schwab has crafted a story about villainy, but, within that theme, she explores the resilience of attachment, of family, of love, of belonging—even for those who actively rail and struggle against it ... Vengeful, like Vicious before it, is one of those books, and Schwab is one of those writers.
