Amanda Foody, Christine Lynn Herman
YA Dark Fantasy
The epic conclusion to Amanda Foody and Christine Lynn Herman’s New York Times bestselling All of Us Villains duology that’s The Hunger Games with magic.
“I feel like I should warn you: this is going to be absolutely brutal.”
For the first time in this ancient, bloodstained story, the tournament is breaking. The boundaries between the city of Ilvernath and the arena have fallen. Reporters swarm the historic battlegrounds. A dead boy now lives again. And a new champion has entered the fray, one who seeks to break the curse for good… no matter how many lives are sacrificed in the process.
As the curse teeters closer and closer to collapse, the surviving champions each face a choice: dismantle the tournament piece by piece, or fight to the death as this story was always intended.
Long-held alliances will be severed. Hearts will break. Lives will end. Because a tale as wicked as this one was never destined for happily ever after.
-Excerpt taken from Goodreads.
Check Goodreads to see the book’s ratings.
My Opinion
“If you’re ashamed of what you were willing to kill for, then maybe it’s time to ask yourself what you’re willing to die for.”
(4 / 5) Ah, the conclusion to a great duology. I read book 1 as and ARC and fell in love with the story. It’s somewhat of a Hunger Games with dark magic thrown in. We have teenagers born and raised to compete in this tournament and have contemplated killing the other players all their lives, even if they’ve been friends. After all, there is only one winner and that family receives High Magick until the next tournament, years later.
“The Grieves had raised Gavin to die. The Lowes had raised Alistair to kill. Both of them deserved a better story.”
What I love is that some are trying to break the tournament. They’re going against what they’ve heard their entire lives and what has gone on for generations. Break it and they can all live. But not everyone wants to break it. Another group is trying to save the tournament. So trying kill to each other or at least sabotage their plans is still happening.
“Heroes are just villains with worse survival instincts and moral superiority complexes.”
I felt like I got to know the characters a bit better in this book and it was never short on adventure. On the flip side, I feel like this story was so much longer than it needed to be. It’s labeled as less than 400 pages but Kindle timed me as reading it 2-3 times longer than a 400 page book should. That is a very high word count and very deceiving! I am probably the only person who will complain about the length but I have multiple ARCs to read and when one takes 3x longer to read, it really throws me off. That being said, because of the length, I put it down more times than I would’ve liked. While I still love the story, I think the length was a downfall. I had to start and stop so many times that it was easy to lose interest.
General content summary: F words: 27, captivity/tied up, physical violence and blood (multiple), teens try to kill each other (often with magick), teens relive the killing of others (brief details), f/f marriage, description of a corpse (detailed), maggots and skeletons attack, torture (physical violence), kisses, m/m attraction and kisses, closed door intimacy, near drowning, death by fire/burns, monsters attack, small battle using magick, self harm (blood was needed for magick).
Thank you to Tor Teen for the gifted copy!
The book releases August 30, 2022.
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