REVIEW | "Our Dark Duet" by Victoria Schwab

Title: Our Dark Duet
Author: Victoria Schwab
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Genre: YA, fantasy
ISBN: 978-0062380883
Page Number: 528 pages





Blurb
THE WORLD IS BREAKING. AND SO ARE THEY.
KATE HARKER isn't afraid of monsters. She hunts them. And she's good at it.
AUGUST FLYNN once yearned to be human. He has a part to play. And he will play it, no matter the cost.
THE WAR HAS BEGUN.
THE MONSTERS ARE WINNING.
Kate will have to return to Verity. August will have to let her back in. And a new monster is waiting—one that feeds on chaos and brings out its victims' inner demons.
Which will be harder to conquer: the monsters they face, or the monsters within?

Execution
While I did like This Savage Song, I didn't LOVE it so I put off reading Our Dark Duet until I picked it up in the bookstore last week and started reading it on a whim.
And hell, it blew me away.
I hadn't even realised how much I loved Kate and August until I started Our Dark Duet. 
Victoria Schwab's books are always very character driven and this one is no excpetion.
We start off six months after This Savage Song ended but it was no problem for me getting back into the story whatsoever. Not only that, I even, head over heels, fell in love with the story.
Reading the whole Monsters of Verity duology was a very unique experience for me: it almost felt like falling in love with a human being - This Savage Song was the getting to know part and realising that you might have found someone you could potentially really love, and Our Dark Duet was the devoting oneself to someone else, the realisation that you've gotten yourself into something that won't be easy to get out of, but you still enjoy every second of your being together and don't ever want it to end.
Yep, that's what it felt like reading this book.
Needless to say I think the execution was exceptionally well done. Although 'well done' doesn't really cover it - that's what my English teacher used to write under my papers, so maybe 'masterpiece' would be more fitting.

Characters
I love, love, love Kate and August.
I love how fierce and strong and smart they are, both in their very own ways.
Kate is not easy to love but I did it anyway, although I feel like she wouldn't like how I feel about her - she's my precious baby (and she would totally kill me for writing that), and so is August.
August is everything to me and throughout the first half of the book, he kept breaking my heart.
I don't even know how to express my feelings towards Kate and August into words anymore.
Victoria Schwab is a master of creating characters that seem incredibly real and reflect the world and humankind in a way that I see very rarely in literature.
I just never want to stop reading about her characters, especially Kate and August. I just love them to pieces.

Emotions
I was warned before going into this book that it would destroy me.
Well, it did.
I really don't know how to move on with life now - I'm sitting here, writing this not an hour after having finished the book (I just NEEDED to express my feelings about it!) and I'm tearing up all the time because I can't get over it.
Throughout the entire book, I was anxious because I knew something was going to happen that would wreck me but when it finally did, it killed me nonetheless because nothing in the world could have prepared me for my feelings.
This was such an emotional read for me, I'm not sure I have any emotions left for other books right now.

Overall
Our Dark Duet has become one of my favourites, no doubt. It was everything I ever wanted a book to be, and everything I never knew I needed in a book.
I'm so sad this duology is over now but I'm so glad it exists and I read it and I want everyone else in the world to read it now.