This Savage Song by Victoria Schwab

I didn't much like This Savage Song.  Let's get that out of the way first.  It was much hyped and, thus, maybe I was expecting too much, but I just didn't care for it.  I went through the first 3/4s or so thinking, "This is fine and I do want to know what's going to happen," and the last 1/4 thinking, "I shouldn't have bothered to finish."

This Savage Song is a dystopian novel about a city torn apart.  There are monsters of three varieties that come into being whenever a big violence is done.  There are two sides to the city, each with bad elements.  At the start of the story, there is an uneasy not always completely enforced truce between the two sides of the city.  Our two main characters are Kate, the daughter of the human leader of one side, and August, the adopted son of the human leader on the other and also a monster.  They end up in school together in an orchestrated act for August to get close to Kate so she can maybe be used as leverage against her father.  In an unusual move for a YA novel or, let's be honest, any novel, really, there is no romance between these two or anyone else in the book for that matter.

While this book had the potential to be really good, I found it only okay.  The writing was fine.  (Although Davan thought the writing was good, so take that as my opinion.)  The story was fine.  The characters were...well, mostly fine, but I didn't like Kate.  She was quite unlikable and a bully.  Even though she was only sort of pretending to be, it was still who she was because it's what she did.  I didn't like her.  Mostly, though, I never came to care much about any of the characters.  One of them, August's sister, I started to feel a bit attached and then she turned out to be something pretty different than I'd thought, which took me back to not really caring about her, either.  I'll say this in as non-spoilery a way as possible, but for the record, it wasn't her history that made me stop caring.  It was the way she acted in the last bit of the book.

I'd been planning on reading some other of Victoria Schwab's books, but now I'm not sure I will.  They may just not be for me.