A review by iam
Not Your Villain by C.B. Lee

4.0

3.5 stars
Oh man I'm kinda torn about this.

But not in the same way as I was about Not Your Sidekick. Mood-wise, I liked Not Your Villain better than its prequel.

I loved Bells. He was great and I related to him a lot and reading from his POV was wonderful.
The plot was good, too, but my issues lie with how its tied together.

The decision to start the book before book1 starts and tell the events from there from Bells' view made sense, but it also lead to several weeks worth of events just being directly told to the reader, which was... not smooth? Technically, someone who hasn't read book1 could this read this and understand, but it leaves out so many nuances and details that I am not sure if it would really work.

What bothered me the most was how Not Your Villain goes from one big event to the next, leaving out completely what happens in between. I understand that getting from point A to point B doesn't always makde sense to describe in detail, but here so many details and questions are just ignored that it startled me. The protagonists are all wanted by a government that does not value privacy and has been established to basically track every transaction that is connected to the Net in any ways (which in this future world means basically anything) and yet...
I might not be describing this well; My point is, reading this made me go "wait.... but how can they even do that given what was revealed/happened earlier????" constantly about a wide variety of things, since it seemed to contradict (or simply ignore or forget about) things learned in book1 or earlier in the book itself.

I still enjoyed reading Not Your Villain a lot. It's entertaining and exciting, I love this group of teenagers and I'm looking forward to the next book, told from Emma's POV.