Review--Our Dark Duet by Victoria Schwab

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?

Picking up my next unfinished duology, I turned to Victoria Schwab’s Our Dark Duet which brings a conclusion to the Monsters of Verity duology. It had been awhile since I read This Savage Song, but luckily I found a summary for THAT!  Diving back into the series was still a bit hard, but manageable.

When we start we join Kate in Prosperity, having left Verity behind, and somehow finds herself working with a group of monster hunters, for monsters are everywhere in this world. Though one chance encounter with a monster leaves Kate shaken, this monster was different from the usual sort and as you can imagine will be a feat of impossibility to defeat.

Eventually, we pop back in on August who’s still in Verity acting as a sort of police force trying to keep some semblance of order and justice in the city that is being run rampant with monsters.

Then of course, as teased at the end of This Savage Song, we see that Sloan is still alive and well, and there’s a new monster in town, one who just rose and looks like Kate in a lot of ways and goes by the name of Alice. Apparently whatever theories I had developed about this were grossly incorrect as I seemed to have forgotten the tidbit about how new monsters are created! Lol. It seems these two have decided to join together because of shared common enemy.

I remember reading reviews saying that it took a while for Kate and August to reunite, and it does. Over a 100+ pages into the story, it almost makes those pages feel like an overly drawn out prologue especially since Kate was in Prosperity all that time. Already, I felt like I was getting off to a bad start with this one since the pace was slow. I understood the need for the slower pacing, there was a lot that had to be built up, but at the same time, I had hoped for something more along the way to these bigger events.

One thing that I did miss that I felt like wasn’t as present in this one was the relationship between Kate and August. They had that sort of reluctant budding friendship that danced along the lines of something maybe more but also the greater potential to turn into a battle to the death. It was heavy. It was complicated. Here, I feel like we got know of that. Mostly because they spend so much time apart. Even when they finally reunite, they still put physical distance between them and I kind of hated it. That spark of chemistry that was infrequently teased in the first book was no longer here. I had idealistic hopes that there would’ve been a stronger romance segue in this story, but alas that was not the case.

The ending was even more shocking! I mean, I was expecting something major to happen but the results were far more devastating than I anticipated.  It’s an ending that left me with conflicted feelings and I am not sure how I feel about everything overall now that it’s all said and done. Was it fitting? Sure, I guess. Could it have ended in another way and been better? Most assuredly. Is this ending the right one? Tough to say, but it’s the ending that we got. Despite the conflicting feelings I have about its ending, Our Dark Duet was still a satisfying read that definitely was one that took me by surprise.

Overall Rating 3.5/5 stars