The Lamb Has To Die

I recently finished reading Fable for the End of the World by Ava Reid.

~POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT~

  Rating: 3.25/5 stars

"By encouraging massive accumulations of debt from its underclass, a single corporation, Caerus, controls all aspects of society.

Inesa lives with her brother in a half-sunken town where they scrape by running a taxidermy shop. Unbeknownst to Inesa, their cruel and indolent mother has accrued an enormous debt—enough to qualify one of her children for Caerus’s livestreamed assassination spectacle: the Lamb’s Gauntlet.

Melinoë is a Caerus assassin, trained to track and kill the sacrificial Lambs. The product of neural reconditioning and physiological alteration, she is a living weapon, known for her cold brutality and deadly beauty. She has never failed to assassinate one of her marks.

When Inesa learns that her mother has offered her as a sacrifice, at first she despairs—the Gauntlet is always a bloodbath for the impoverished debtors. But she’s had years of practice surviving in the apocalyptic wastes, and with the help of her hunter brother, she might stand a chance of staying alive.

For Melinoë, this is a game she can’t afford to lose. Despite her reputation for mercilessness, she is haunted by painful flashbacks. After her last Gauntlet, where she broke down on livestream, she desperately needs redemption.

As Mel pursues Inesa across the wasteland, both girls begin to question everything: Inesa wonders if there’s more to life than survival, while Mel wonders if she’s capable of more than killing.

And both wonder if, against all odds, they might be falling in love."

Alas, I must add this to my list of books that had some excellent concepts, but an underwhelming execution.

The thing is: there were so many excellent concepts this book put forth that I think deserve exploration given all their relevance to this day and age. The objective dangers of giving power to corporations and allowing businesses to monopolize. The way the over-consumption of both goods and media drives people further away from their humanity & empathy. The way women are so quick to be objectified and vilified by the media — often in the same breath — and how people will be quick to berate them and direct their vitriol at them behind the safety of an anonymous comment, while also equally willing to cast them as the star of their depraved fantasies.

Ultimately, I felt like this book often tried to jump to showing its conclusions without giving what I considered to be a convincing route for how it got there. There were a lot of logistics about the economy of the world, the setup of the Gauntlet itself, and the stakes to both the people in power and the people at the bottom that did not seem logical to me. This book didn't so much have an issue with plot holes, as many of the questions about the worldbuilding did end up getting answered, but rather that the answers we were given didn't seem to fit with either the setup of their society or the general direction in which one would expect people to be motivated. Maybe it's just a case of me thinking about things too much, but more often it felt like I was wishing Ava had thought about things more.

While I think Inesa and Mel made for good characters to follow to see two sides of this world, I felt like their development wasn't terribly balanced. I think Mel's arc, with working through all of the programming and trauma she had endured and trying to unlearn years of conditioning, was definitely the most compelling, and it felt like she had the most interesting storyline throughout the book. Inesa, on the other hand, was kinda just... there. While we did get to see them share their experiences and thoughts, and vulnerabilities with one another, there was never much about Inesa that made it feel like she was different than any generic FMC. On top of this, the romance did feel very insta-lovey, with the "slow burn" mostly coming from how many pages it took for their characters to interact for the first time, but with them going from "she could kill me at any moment" to risking their lives for one another in what I'm pretty sure was a matter of days.

Just in general, I think this book needed far more page time to do what it needed to do effectively. I think that this book had the whisperings of having a lot of intricacy to its larger world, but that it never got a chance to actually develop anything more than was strictly needed for this particular story. I think the characters had the chance to have some compelling arcs and resulting commentary on society and trauma, and class disparities, but that the actual situations they were in didn't allow for the needed development. And I think that the plot that I was hoping would be as gripping and unpredictable as the Hunger Games Battle Royale competition it was compared to most often forgot to employ its potentially most interesting mechanics, and mainly just felt like a mildly Last of Us-style camping simulator.

But also, I didn't hate reading it, and while I have critiques, it's more to do with things that disappointed me rather than things I actively disliked. I feel like this is a book best consumed in one sitting, so it's possible that if I'd read it faster, I would have felt entrenched in the world more deeply and would have enjoyed it more. All in all, I think I would have been less disappointed if my hopes hadn't been so high, so ultimately I think this is pretty solidly a three-star read as a book that didn't live up to my expectations, but that I wouldn't warn anyone away from.

Check out Fable for the End of the World, and discover what happens when you must work with your enemy for survival.