Our Dark Duet outstrips This Savage Song by a wide margin, ensnaring readers from the prelude and holding on through the final page.
Yours truly has read a lot of different books this week. I saved Our Dark Duet for last for a number of reasons. Chief among them are these. It was one of the books I’d looked forward to most this year. And, having read This Savage Song last year, I knew I would be in for a ride.
Suffice it to say that there is so much of a ride in this book that I almost wish I could go back and experience it for the first time all over again. This is the kind of book that leaves you affected after you read it.
Our Dark Duet picks up six months after Savage Song leaves off, opening on August Flynn now completely focused on his mission as a member of the Flynn Task Force, keeping the monsters plaguing V-City at bay and helping those he can. Meanwhile, Kate Harker is in Prosperity, another city, doing her very best impression of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (complete with her own Scooby Gang). But when Kate comes back to town, it’s because there’s a new monster to fight.
This book starts out pretty dark and only becomes darker as it continues. There’s no getting around that. But when it’s right there in the title — when things have gone from savage to dark — that’s practically to be expected.
It demands your attention, luring you back in, and the comparison to August’s music is an easy one, but it works. However, Kate’s sections are equally compelling, and even the breaks to visit Sloan, the book’s primary antagonist, have their own appeal. Schwab also isn’t afraid to change up the formatting for specific portions of the book, reading more like freeform poetry than anything else, and with such a focus on music, it feels perfectly in place anyway.
Savage Song was good. Dark Duet is so much better. It has all sorts of emotions wrapped up within that, after finishing, yours truly dropped her head back and may or may not have uttered a few expletives. Not because the book was bad, but because, as I noted all those months ago in the above-linked slideshow, Schwab has a way of playing with the readers’ emotions, raising them up and then hitting with the feelings equivalent of an uppercut or gut punch or possibly both with a kick thrown in afterwards for good measure.
But of course, the characters in the book also have their own feelings. Schwab doesn’t lay them on too thickly, though. They’re there. They bubble beneath the surface. They burst out in one fantastic scene in particular, late on in the novel. However, even when those feelings aren’t the focus, they appear here and there.
It’s impressive that both of Schwab’s books this year — this and A Conjuring of Light — are both magnificent. Her skill only improves as she continues writing.
It’s probably impossible to read This Savage Song and Our Dark Duet back to back for the sake of your own soul. In fact, Dark Duet catches a reader up with ease, so you don’t need to worry too much about not remembering all of the details of Savage Song.
Just make sure that you block out plenty of time to read. You won’t want to put it down.
Next: Review: Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom
Our Dark Duet is now out at bookstores.