Kate Harker and August Flynn are the heirs to a divided city, a grisly metropolis where the violence has begun to create real and deadly monsters. All Kate wants is to be as ruthless as her father, who lets the monsters roam free and makes the inhabitants pay for his protection. August just wants to be human, as good-hearted as his own father but his curse is to be what the humans fear. The thin truce that keeps the Harker and Flynn families at peace is crumbling, and an assassination attempt forces Kate and August into a tenuous alliance. But how long will they survive in a city where no one is safe and monsters are real...
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A girl who wants to be a monster and a monster who wants to be a boy learn that you can't always get what they you in This Savage Song, a refreshingly unromantic urban fantasy bolstered by a brilliantly built background and a pair of expertly crafted characters more interested in making the best of their bad lots than in bumping uglies.
Though we're given a gaggle of glimpses of the wasted world that surrounds it on all sides, the first volume of V. E. Schwab's Monsters of Verity series takes place primarily in V-City, twelve years on from something called the Phenomenon: an apocalypse of sorts which means, for whatever reason, that monsters are born whenever humans do wrong.
The saviour who took August in in the wake of whatever catastrophe created him has managed to make lemonade out of those very lemons, however, by using said Sunai's nightmarish nature to do good. As the founder of the FTF, an organisation which keeps the South side of this split city safe, Henry Flynn has enlisted August and his kin to seek out and eat bad people. He's also "the only man willing to stand up to a glorified criminal and fight." (p.38)
That glorified criminal is Callum Harker, the enterprising mind behind the protection racket that keeps the Corsai and the Malchai at bay beyond the bounds of Henry's territory, and our other protagonist's father.
Though we're given a gaggle of glimpses of the wasted world that surrounds it on all sides, the first volume of V. E. Schwab's Monsters of Verity series takes place primarily in V-City, twelve years on from something called the Phenomenon: an apocalypse of sorts which means, for whatever reason, that monsters are born whenever humans do wrong.
The Corsai seemed to come from violent, but nonlethal acts, and the Malchai stemmed from murders, but the Sunai, it was believed, came from the darkest crimes of all: bombings, shootings, massacres, events that claimed not only one life, but many. All that pain and death coalescing into something truly terrible; if a monster's catalyst informed its nature, then the Sunai were the worst things to go bump in the night. (p.190)That's what a lot of the people who live in V-City think, particularly those who've chosen to pay for the privilege, but August Flynn is one such Sunai, and he isn't evil in the least. Sure, he swallows souls whole, but only the souls of sinners, and only then when he absolutely has to.
The saviour who took August in in the wake of whatever catastrophe created him has managed to make lemonade out of those very lemons, however, by using said Sunai's nightmarish nature to do good. As the founder of the FTF, an organisation which keeps the South side of this split city safe, Henry Flynn has enlisted August and his kin to seek out and eat bad people. He's also "the only man willing to stand up to a glorified criminal and fight." (p.38)
That glorified criminal is Callum Harker, the enterprising mind behind the protection racket that keeps the Corsai and the Malchai at bay beyond the bounds of Henry's territory, and our other protagonist's father.