Vengeful — Villains, Book 2

Vengeful Review

Five years is a long time to wait for a sequel, and Vengeful arrives knowing that expectation is a burden. V.E. Schwab’s strategy is to expand rather than simply continue: the world of ExtraOrdinaries gets bigger, the moral questions get more complicated, and a new character arrives who immediately contends for the most memorable figure in the series.

Marcella Riggins’s power is entropy — she can cause things to decay and collapse with a touch. She discovers this ability after her husband, a mid-level crime boss, tries to have her killed because she knew too much. That she survives and he does not is the beginning of Marcella’s education in what she is capable of and what she intends to do with it. Unlike Victor, who would prefer to operate invisibly, or Eli, who wraps his violence in religious justification, Marcella is entirely transparent about her motivations: she wants power and recognition, she has been underestimated her entire life, and she is finished with that. There is something almost refreshing about a villain with no ideology beyond the personal.

The multi-POV structure is more complex than Vicious, tracking Victor’s continued evasion of EON (the government’s ExtraOrdinary capture unit), Eli’s captivity and the bargain he’s offered, and Marcella’s rapid ascent through organised crime. Schwab juggles these threads with considerable skill, and the convergence in the final act is managed with the same cool architectural precision that made the first book’s timeline-switching so effective.

Vengeful is a confident, ambitious sequel. It completes the Villains duology with something genuinely surprising: hope, of a kind, in the most unexpected of places.

Reading Guides

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

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Vengeful apart: Marcella Riggins is one of Schwab’s most commanding creations — a villain who owns what she is completely; The multi-POV structure is handled with the same cool architectural precision as Vicious; Expands the ExtraOrdinary world without losing what made the first book essential; and The ending delivers something genuinely surprising — hope, in the most unexpected of places. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Vengeful give it weight beyond its surface narrative. A villain with no ideology beyond the personal is in some ways more honest than one wrapped in religious justification. Power without accountability becomes violence without limit — Marcella’s arc demonstrates this clearly. The most interesting sequels expand the world’s moral questions rather than just escalating the stakes. Survival is not the same as justice — the people who make it through are not necessarily the ones who deserved to. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

Series Context

By 2 in the series, V.E. Schwab has built enough world and character depth to sustain a story that would be impossible in a standalone. The accumulated reader investment pays off here: stakes feel genuine because the world feels real. The book does what good middle-series entries must — it satisfies on its own terms while clearly advancing toward a larger conclusion.

Limitations

The five-year gap between Vicious and this publication means some of the first book’s freshness has worn off. Three simultaneous storylines means each thread gets less space than it might deserve. EON as an institutional antagonist is less compelling than the personal antagonism of Vicious. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Marcella Riggins: A New Kind of Villain

Marcella is the element that lifts Vengeful beyond competent sequel into something more ambitious. Where Victor is defined by cold intelligence and Eli by religious conviction, Marcella is defined by clarity. She knows exactly what she is, what she wants, and what the world has consistently underestimated about her. Her discovery of her power is not a crisis of identity but a confirmation of what she always believed: that she was more capable than the men around her would admit.

Schwab writes Marcella without the ambivalence she brings to Victor — Marcella is not sympathetic in the conventional sense, but she is understandable in a way that is almost uncomfortable. The system that produced her, the crime world that used her as an accessory rather than a principal, and the husband who decided she was too dangerous to keep alive — these are not justifications but context. Marcella’s response to her circumstances is disproportionate and catastrophic, and Schwab does not pretend otherwise. But she is given enough interiority that her logic is visible, which is more than most genre villains receive.

EON and Institutional Menace

The government’s ExtraOrdinary capture unit — EON — functions as the novel’s bureaucratic antagonist, and it raises questions the first book did not need to address: what does a state apparatus do with people who possess abilities it cannot control? The answer, unsurprisingly, is to contain and exploit them. EON’s approach to Eli — keeping him alive because his regenerative power is useful, offering him an arrangement that serves both parties’ interests — is the novel’s most uncomfortable institutional portrait.

As an antagonist, EON is less personally menacing than Eli at his worst, but it represents something the personal antagonism of Vicious could not: the way systems replicate the violence of individuals at scale, with bureaucratic cover and plausible deniability. Vengeful is a darker book than its predecessor in ways that go beyond individual cruelty.

Victor’s Continuing Deterioration

Victor’s arc in Vengeful involves the breakdown of his power — a consequence of how he acquired it — and the increasingly desperate measures he takes to manage it. This is Schwab’s way of ensuring that the sequel’s Victor is not simply a repeat of the first book’s: the man who was formidably in control is now managing something he does not fully understand, and his determination to maintain the appearance of control while the substance of it deteriorates is one of the most psychologically interesting threads in the novel.

His relationship with Sydney continues to be the emotional core of his story. She is not a child he chose; she is a responsibility he accepted, and what he is willing to do to protect her — and what he is not willing to acknowledge about why — gives the novel’s most ruthless figure a vulnerability he would absolutely deny.

The Surprise of the Ending

Vengeful ends with something that genuinely surprises readers who followed Vicious: a version of hope. Not resolution exactly, and not a conventional happy ending, but a configuration of circumstances that leaves the surviving characters with something worth protecting and, arguably, something worth living for. For a duology built on the premise that extraordinary power and ordinary happiness are incompatible, this is not a small achievement. Schwab earns it.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.4/5 — A worthy sequel that expands the world without losing what made Vicious essential: Marcella is one of Schwab’s most commanding creations — a villain who understands what she is and owns it completely — and the converging storylines deliver a genuinely satisfying payoff.