Reviews - This Ravenous Fate

1.2k reviews for:

This Ravenous Fate

Hayley Dennings

3.48 AVERAGE

maszczar96's review against another edition

3.25

adventurous challenging reflective sad slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

lots of political parallels, which was interesting for a book about a sapphic vampire/human relationship

genielee's review against another edition

4.5

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I don’t know that I’ve ever been so happy to have a book in my hands. This novel is perfect and has so many wonderful elements for a debut. The pacing is a bit slow in some parts but overwhelmingly it comes together.
Denning builds characters and relationships I care intimately about. I gasped, I yelled, I cheered. Diversify your reading and look into this beautiful black novel featuring sapphics, vampires, and second chances.

emsavidge's review against another edition

3.0

There’s definitely some good stuff going on here and I think it’s a solid enough debut. The mystery just gets kind of muddled towards the end in a way that feels a bit confused. I was also expecting more clue hunting with the girls and there was some for a bit but it felt like it got dropped for other things. I’m also confused by some of the antagonists motivations. I thought that money was the obvious answer but I’m unsure if the author intended for that to be their motivation. This confusion about motive connects back to the clunky way the mystery panned out. I also felt like we could have had a much stronger cliffhanger for the second book instead it felt like there was too much book post climax.

poisonivy's review against another edition

5.0

adventurous dark emotional mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

alica2's review against another edition

2.0

dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

I wanted to like this so bad....the premise was so interesting (sapphic vampires, childhood friends to enemies who now have to work together to solve mysteries, set in Jazz era Harlem!!) but unfortunately it didn't manage to deliver. I never had a good grasp on character motivations, and it seemed like each character had different versions of themselves based on whatever the plot demanded of them (such as Elise's father making her work with Layla to solve the murders, despite the fact that he wants Layla dead and could very easily just blame her for the murders instead??) which just made me confused and frustrated.

I liked Elise and Layla's relationship in the beginning, and thought they had some cute moments while confronting each other (and themselves) about their tragic past. Unfortunately, I never fully understood what happened in their past, so the stakes of their relationship always felt flimsy. Similarly, I liked the general concept of Elise struggling to earn her father's respect, but he was too one-sided of a character for their relationship to have as much of the emotional impact that I was told Elise was feeling. Which is a shame, because I also liked the depiction of Elise's anxiety and OCD, and felt that it would hit harder if I had a stronger grounding in her family dynamics other than "dad hates her for not being her older sister who died trying to protect her".

I also hated Elise by the end....she was too waffly of a character, which would have been interesting except for the fact that she never really faced any consequences or reckoned with the privileges that Layla called her out on. There was one part where I blurted "what the fuck" out loud in real life because I was so shocked by what she had done....

basically she stabbed her closest friend and confidant (who had been becoming colder towards her recently, but that was only because she got him in trouble with her dad for helping her infiltrate some secret event her dad was hosting, and her dad is basically the only family he has left so he can't afford to be fired from their estate) with the "cure" that she was supposed to inject into Layla to prove loyalty to her dad, which then made said friend go on a rampage, and it just came out of nowhere and she showed zero hesitation or remorse for having done so and it was almost treated as a given that she would do that?? Because I guess it's bad of the friend for pulling away and taking her dad's side?? Even though it makes total sense for him to do that, and she never made amends with him for having put him in a compromising position???

Unfortunately, I could keep going on because literally every character had moments like this where they would do things that didn't make sense or which contradicted their earlier thought-process and behaviors (like

Layla suddenly wanting the cure despite being distrustful of humans, or Layla and Mei suddenly being revealed to have had an intimate relationship despite Layla being dismissive of her early on in the book, or the original reaper lady randomly kidnapping Elise's sister and working with her father despite purportedly also hating humans

). I think the author has a lot of good ideas and interesting concepts (like the theme of eugenics and the cruelty of human experimentation on Black people), but I wish more time had been put into characterization and character-driven plot rather than forcing characters to work around the plot.