Review: Vengeful

Vengeful 
Rating: 3.5/5
Buy or Borrow: Buy
Source: Copy courtesy of the publisher! 

Magneto and Professor X. Superman and Lex Luthor. Victor Vale and Eli Ever. Sydney and Serena Clarke. Great partnerships, now soured on the vine.

But Marcella Riggins needs no one. Flush from her brush with death, she's finally gained the control she's always sought-and will use her newfound power to bring the city of Merit to its knees. She'll do whatever it takes, collecting her own sidekicks, and leveraging the two most infamous EOs, Victor Vale and Eli Ever, against each other once more.

With Marcella's rise, new enmities create opportunity-and the stage of Merit City will once again be set for a final, terrible reckoning. 

This review is quite late, and in truth it's because I've been debating what to rate this book and trying to decide just how I feel about it. You guys know that I really love Victoria's books and I really, really loved Vicious...which makes me feel so awful about giving this book only 3.5 stars but I have to be honest. 

The start of the book, for me, was explosive and enticing and pulled me back in to the world and everything came flooding back from the last book. I really do love the storytelling for this series, switching back and forth through time and POV's helps to keep your interest and keep you intrigued and wanting to know what happens next. I also feel like it makes the book feel a bit more fast paced, even when nothing much is happening, plus we get to dip in and out of the characters and their backstories and see how they got their powers. In short I feel like it's a brilliant way of showing us the character's pasts, without sacrificing the pace and the plot. 

We have Victor trying to find a cure for his little...problem and suffering with it. Sydney is feeling guilty about what she did to Victor but she also knows he killed a certain person and she starts to befriend June. June...honestly I didn't really trust her from the start. I thought it was odd that she decided to be BFFS with Syd and I'm still not sure why she did. I just figured she was trying to get her away from Victor, but he's my little cinnamon roll okay, and whatever she was thinking, she was wrong! Either way she was on board with Marcella's plot and I just side yeed her more and more, and I'm actually sad we didn't get to find out more about her. 

As for Marcella, I actually felt for her and was like "yaaaas girl, get your revenge!". I got where she was coming from, and I did actually like her, but at the same time I was like "oh honey, don't do it because EON will come for your ass". By the end though, I was actually team Kill Marcella because she was gunning for Sydney and I wasn't having that. 

Interestingly we get a lot of Eli's background this time round, and see some of the events of the last book from his POV. But we delve deeper into his character and while I don't hate him as much as I did before....I still don't particularly like him. And once again we get to see our faves from the previous book, plus we get a whole new host of characters that are as equally morally grey.  

My issue is that I just didn't enjoy this one as much as Vicious, and it reached a point halfway through when it was a struggle to pick up the book and keep reading and I would procrastinate from reading. I felt like it was a bit slower, and the action wasn't really there until the end. We did build up to it nicely however, with threads being woven in, and things explained and set up for the big final event, but we had so many side characters and some of them, like June, I don't feel where delved in to properly. Like I said, her motivation for me is still a question. And while I thought it was fun to get these new characters and see more EO's....a lot of them I just wasn't particularly interested in and as much as I enjoyed Marcella and June....I wanted to get back to Victor and Eli. 

The ending in general was an issue for me too, because I was left with question, and I just wasn't satisfied with the ending at all. I don't know whether it was just me, or what, but I just didn't love this one as much as the first book and I went in to this one fully expecting to give it 5 stars and be raving about it but it was just...a bit of a struggle towards the middle part.