Fable for The End of the World by Ava Reid - A Customer Review
Synopsis:
The Last of Us meets The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes in this stand-alone dystopian romance about survival, sacrifice, and love that risks everything. 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.
Keira’s Review:
This is the sapphic enemies-to-lovers hunger games we never knew we needed.
Described as a blend of Hunger Games and The Last of Us, this book is perfectly placed with the dystopian genre with elements of cyberpunk thrown in.
Two POVs run throughout the book allowing the reader to see both viewpoints in an ever changing world of survival. We meet Inesa who is a sacrifice for an uncaring mother thrust into the Gauntlet to pay off her debts and Melinoë, who will be the one to kill her on live television.
One overarching theme of this book is its dark. Both main characters have suffered in life though differently. Inesa has suffered through her environment with an absent dad and an unkind mother forced to be the breadwinner along with her brother. Melinoë suffers throughout the book as a Caerus assassin who has been conditioned and altered since she was a child to be the perfect weapon. She struggles with not knowing her true self and past. Through something called the Wipe she doest know who she is or how many memories she's lost and, consequently, her body is not her own.
This book was well developed with world-building and setting the scene. The character development and growth flowed well throughout and the twists were also well done. My first read from Ava Reid and overall a great beginning.
The ending for me was really good, however this was marketed as a standalone but I want more. With the way it's left at the end I feel this book could easily have a sequel, but equally satisfied with the ending.
