Fiendish

Fiendish by Brenna Yovanoff, 341 pages

Back when I read Paper Valentine, Yovanoff's previous book, I said that if she kept improving at the rate she was going, her next book would be a real killer. Well, Fiendish is a marked improvement over both Paper Valentine and The Replacement, but it's still not... quite there. I guess there was more room to grow that I thought.

With each book, Yovanoff gets better at storytelling, and better at presenting her imagery. Her setups and payoffs keep improving. Each story she writes feels more interesting than the last. After the first two or three chapters of Fiendish, I was sure she'd finally nailed it - it was so strange and interesting, so unlike anything she'd done before, so legitimately grim as opposed to "Halloween Sale at the Hallmark Store" grim. But as it proceeded, a lot of the same old flaws cropped up. Even the flawed parts are less flawed, but there are still areas that need work.

I'm not sure if Yovanoff has an attachment to stories where the male lead and the female lead are "soulmates" or "fall in love at first sight" or "were meant for each other," or if she just consistently struggles to make the romances in her stories feel valid, but it's still an issue here. Clementine and Fisher don't so much fall in love as they are told that they're in love by the author. It's the best-justified so far of her romance plotlines, but the justification comes too late in the book to seem relevant. It's like Yovanoff wants to break out of the typical YA romance trappings - all of her books could stand on their own without the love stories, and might be better off without them - but somewhere got the impression (or was told) that she couldn't be successful without them. She certainly has the skill to do better, one way or the other.

All that said, this is a solid book. I still stand by that if Yovanoff keeps improving, one of her books will become a favorite of mine. This one was on track to be that book, but it faltered just a bit.