This Savage Song — Monsters of Verity, Book 1

This Savage Song Review

V.E. Schwab’s This Savage Song begins with one of the best world-building conceits in recent young adult fantasy: in the city of Verity, violence does not merely cause suffering — it creates monsters. Murders produce Malchai, elegant predators with red eyes and a taste for blood. Smaller cruelties generate Corsai, scratching swarms that lurk in darkness. And the rarest, most powerful monsters, the Sunai, are born from acts of mass violence — they look human, live among humans, and feed on the souls of sinners.

August Flynn is a Sunai who wants desperately to be the human he appears to be. He plays violin, follows rules with anxious exactness, and counts his heartbeats as proof that something inside him is alive. Kate Harker is the daughter of the man who controls South Verity by selling monster protection, and she has spent years making herself as hard and cold as her father’s reputation demands. When August is sent to surveil Kate at her school and their cover is blown, the two find themselves fleeing the city together under circumstances that quickly become lethal.

Schwab makes several choices that distinguish This Savage Song from its genre contemporaries. The most significant is refusing to develop the August-Kate relationship as a romance. Their connection is genuine but built on recognition rather than attraction — two people who understand each other’s performance of identity because they are both performing one. The world-building earns its complexity without exposition dumps, and the monster taxonomy is used thematically rather than decoratively.

Reading Order

This Savage Song is book one of two. Read it before Our Dark Duet.

Reading Guides

• V.E. Schwab Books in Order: Shades of Magic, Villains, and Complete Guide (2026)

V.E. Schwab and Her Body of Work

Victoria Schwab, who publishes adult fiction as V.E. Schwab and young-adult work under variations of her name, is one of the most prolific and versatile fantasists of her generation. By the time This Savage Song appeared in 2016 she had already built a devoted readership with the Shades of Magic trilogy, beginning with A Darker Shade of Magic, and with the morally slippery superhero-villain novel Vicious. She would go on to reach an even wider audience with The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. What recurs across this range is a fascination with characters who exist at the boundary of human — the magicians, the “Extraordinaries,” the cursed and the bargained-for — and This Savage Song fits squarely in that lineage. It was Schwab’s first foray into a contemporary-adjacent urban setting rather than secondary-world fantasy, and the Monsters of Verity duology let her test how far she could push a premise that is conceptual rather than ornamental.

A Premise Built on Consequence

The strength of This Savage Song is that its central conceit is also its central argument. In a world where every act of violence literally spawns a monster, cruelty cannot be externalised and forgotten — it walks the streets afterward, hungry and visible. The three orders of monsters function as a precise moral taxonomy: Corsai born of casual brutality, Malchai of murder, and the rare Sunai of mass atrocity. Schwab is not decorating a romance with horror imagery; she is using the monsters to make a point about the cost of human harm that ordinary realism cannot dramatise. August’s anguish about feeding on souls, even the souls of the guilty, becomes a sustained inquiry into whether monstrousness is a matter of nature or of choice.

Identity as Performance

The deeper theme connecting August and Kate is performance. Kate works relentlessly to become the hard, untouchable daughter her crime-lord father expects, smoking and snarling her way through a sixth school as if cruelty were a costume she can finally make fit. August performs humanity just as deliberately, counting tally marks into his skin, playing his violin, clinging to rituals that prove he is more than appetite. The novel’s quiet insight is that these two opposite performances mirror each other, and that the only person who can see through Kate’s act is the one whose entire existence is also an act. Schwab withholds the romance most readers expect precisely because the relationship she is interested in — recognition between two people who are both pretending — is rarer and more affecting than attraction.

Verity and Its Limits

The duology unfolds entirely within the divided city of Verity, split between Kate’s father Callum Harker, who sells protection from the monsters, and August’s adoptive family the Flynns, who try to hold a fragile order. Schwab keeps the geography tight and the stakes local, which gives the world an intense, claustrophobic clarity but also leaves the larger setting beyond Verity barely sketched. As the first half of a two-book story, This Savage Song ends on a pivot rather than a resolution; the full arc completes in Our Dark Duet. Readers who prefer self-contained novels should know they are committing to both halves.

Who Should Read It and How

This Savage Song will reward readers who want their young-adult fantasy thematically serious and structurally inventive, and who are willing to sit with a heroine whose early hardness is meant to repel before it earns sympathy. It is an excellent entry point to Schwab for anyone curious about her work but not yet ready for the sprawl of the Shades of Magic trilogy. Approach it expecting a dark allegory about violence and selfhood rather than a romance, read it back-to-back with Our Dark Duet to feel the whole shape of the story, and let the monster taxonomy do its quiet work as a metaphor for trauma carried into the open.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — A genuinely original premise executed with confidence: the world-building is economical and imaginative, and Schwab refuses the expected romance trajectory, treating the August-Kate dynamic as something more interesting than attraction.