I saw a lot of social media responses to this, but thankfully no spoilers, before I got around to reading it myself. Many of the responses involved some expression of devastating emotional impact upon finishing this book. I don’t see it. Our Dark Duet is not a happy book, and the ending really fits with the tone of the story overall, but I just don’t see the devastating crushing heartbreak that was described by lots of people of Facebook, Twitter, etc.
My biggest problem is Kate Harker. She doesn’t really develop at all in this story. At the end of This Savage Song (book 1), she had at least demonstrated some personal growth or potential. She’s a monster-hunter and killer almost without purpose. She spends the whole novel killing, narrowly avoiding being killed, and planning her revenge against her father’s shadow/Malachi Sloan. August at least has some complexity to him. He’s a Sunnai, but he still struggles with human feelings, and new character Soro is a really good foil for him (although, while I respect the genderless-ness of Soro’s character, the pronoun usage irritated me). I admit it took an embarrassingly long time to catch the pun in Soro’s name.
Plot-wise the first half moved really slowly for me, because it was mostly the 2 main characters August and Kate contemplating their current situations and {spoiler alert for the previous book} the changes since Kate’s father died at the end of This Savage Song. The new people in Kate’s life during this part of the book could have been interesting but they really don’t get a lot of attention because Kate glosses over their existence. Once Kate decides to return to Verity, and the action picks up, they don’t even matter at all. The flicker of teaser that some new plague that turns people into monsters or at least taints their souls wasn’t terribly interesting because I could already see that the hint dropped at the end of the first story about Kate’s eventual fate was being set up (and I was right).
The saddest part about the whole finale was Ilsa’s fate, and she’s a side character. What happens to her wasn’t even that surprising, except that it didn’t involve Kate or August hardly at all. I was really thinking one of them would end up doing something along the line of what Ilsa did and what she actually accomplished by it. There was something almost bittersweet about August and Kate’s last scene, and I don’t think that was supposed to be the reaction. I do like that although things wrapped pretty neatly, there was enough open-endedness about the survivors’ futures that there were still things to imagine or speculate about.
I think overall that while this was a good book, I’ve like others by the same author much better. So, by general standards this should be a great book. But because V.E. (Victoria when she does YA) Schwab has done better than good enough times, this one ended up overall feeling just pretty decent. 3.5 stars.