Fable For The End Of The World by Ava Reid
Blurb:
The Last of Us meets The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in this stand-alone dystopian romance about survival, sacrifice, and love that risks everything.
By encouraging massive accumulations of debt from its underclass, a single corporation, Caerus, controls all aspects of society.
Inesa lives with her brother in a half-sunken town where they scrape by running a taxidermy shop. Unbeknownst to Inesa, their cruel and indolent mother has accrued an enormous debt—enough to qualify one of her children for Caerus’s livestreamed assassination spectacle: the Lamb’s Gauntlet.
Melinoë is a Caerus assassin, trained to track and kill the sacrificial Lambs. The product of neural reconditioning and physiological alteration, she is a living weapon, known for her cold brutality and deadly beauty. She has never failed to assassinate one of her marks.
When Inesa learns that her mother has offered her as a sacrifice, at first she despairs—the Gauntlet is always a bloodbath for the impoverished debtors. But she’s had years of practice surviving in the apocalyptic wastes, and with the help of her hunter brother she might stand a chance of staying alive.
For Melinoë, this is a game she can’t afford to lose. Despite her reputation for mercilessness, she is haunted by painful flashbacks. After her last Gauntlet, where she broke down on livestream, she desperately needs redemption.
As Mel pursues Inesa across the wasteland, both girls begin to question everything: Inesa wonders if there’s more to life than survival, while Mel wonders if she’s capable of more than killing.
And both wonder if, against all odds, they might be falling in love.
Review:
“I think the moral is that there’s always one memory that will ruin you, no matter how perfect your record, no matter how many times you’ve killed and felt nothing at all.”
―Ava Reid, Fable For The End Of The World
In Fable For The End Of The World, Inesa is an Outlier who runs a taxidermy shop, stuffing the animals her brother hunts and kills in order to garner enough money to stabilize their lives. But when her mentally ill mother turns her over for the infamous production called The Gauntlet, she’s forced to flee from her home with her brother to escape the infamous, apathetic Angel named Melinoe, who’s been sent to kill her on a livestream that funds their detached government. As Isena and her brother seek a civilization their absent father directed them to before he vanished years prior, she faces Outliers that have become corrupted by the radiation of the outside world, starvation, and worse: falling in love with the very creature she’s supposed to fear—Melinoe.
After reading A Study In Drowning and A Theory Of Dreaming by Ava Reid, I knew she would forever be one of my favorite authors. That streak still stands with Fable For The End Of The World, a post-apocalyptic masterpiece imbued with equal parts tragedy, gritty worldbuilding, and a sapphic romance readers will watch burn as if through the very pages of the novel.
Reid has a spectacular voice for gritty atmospheres, like in the destroyed and flooded world in which the Outliers live, as well as prose that feels raw, vulnerable and real.
As a reader, the voice is essential to how much I like, or am immersed in, a story. Reid manages to ensnare me every time with descriptions adhered to the characters. Inesa, as an example, compares things to dead animals and the suffering she experienced under her mother’s jurisdiction when she lived with her, throughout the entirety of the narrative.
It’s easy to fall into these pages and wish I never had to come out; it’s an unforgettable tale of heartbreak, regret, and the risks we take when we love.
One of my favorite things about this novel was how the tension never ceased. From the tainted Outliers (called Wends) to the twists and turns taken by the narrative, each sentence feels like a heartbeat in my chest, begging me to race onward through the story. It was satisfying in the way the best stories are satisfying, giving me just enough characterization—like through Inesa’s weakness at the sight of blood, or Melinoe’s blurry past—and just enough stakes—like Inesa’s fear for her brother, and what Melinoe risks if she remains as cold-blooded as she is—to be a little sad when I turned the final page.
I also think it’s worth noting how much Fable For The End Of The World touches on how the story’s world came about, especially near the end. Without spoiling anything, this novel is a fabulous commentary on some of the behaviors and habits of people in the real, modern world, and how they might be detrimental to future generations.
This novel had me questioning my own morals, my own decisions, and how they might impact others. This novel might’ve been fiction, but it truly has the potential to change minds and hearts across the world with its message: that if we’re all fighting to survive, none of us will ever truly live.
All in all, this novel was just like all of Reid’s work that I’ve had the pleasure of reading so far: spectacular.
Guest Reviewer Bio:
Mylee J. Miller is a reader and author in a never-ending fight against her infinite TBR. She enjoys reading many genres, but science fiction and fantasy of most subgenres are where she finds herself at home. She adores books with the same vibes as The Bridge Kingdom by Danielle L Jensen, A Study In Drowning by Ava Reid, Little Thieves by Margaret Owen, and anything by Brandon Mull, Brandon Sanderson, Andy Weir, and Leigh Bardugo. When she’s not fighting to become a not-so-gourmet chef or walking her cat, you can find her screaming along to Imagine Dragons music and eating too much Italian food.
