Fable for the End of the World / Ava Reid / Book Review

FABLE FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

Everyone and their grandmother might be obsessed with watching the Lamb's Gauntlet, but Inesa wants nothing to do with all of that. She's got it tough enough as it is, running a taxidermy shop in a ramshackle town one rainstorm from being washed from the face of the earth. She wants nothing to do with the mega-corporation Caerus, with their flashy products and the debts they help accumulate. That, or their deadly competition for those who default.

Melinoë, on the other hand, is Caerus itself. Or at least, she's the face of Caerus to the people. One of Caerus's products, she is a living weapon, psychologically altered and reconditioned to be a brutal and deadly beauty. She's the cold weapon sent out to slaughter Caerus's chosen Lamb on livestream, entertaining the masses and digging one family out of debt in the process. She's never failed to assassinate one of her marks.

When Inesa learns her mother's offered her up to Caerus to worm her way out of debt, she doesn't think there's a chance of her survival. Especially when Caerus's chosen hunter is the cold and calculating Melinoë. But Inesa's brother won't let her go down without a fight, and with him at her side, she might stand a chance out in the apocalyptic wastes at the edges of Caerus's control. 

THOUGHTS

Ava Reid is obviously someone who loves YA dystopia, and I mean that in the best and worst way. She knows how to write an engaging story, how to weave familiar tropes into a startling apocalyptic landscape. This book is fun, but... it isn't very good at being dystopia. It has all the elements. It has all the tropes and genre conventions, but it lacks one crucial factor: a strong critique of the contemporary social world. Was it a bad read? Not by any stretch. But it doesn't live up to what dystopia can (and should) be.

PROS

Environmental Doom	As much as Reid is playing in a familiar dystopian playground, this book does add a new element to the usual routine: environmental catastrophe. This world, or at least the crumbling rural outskirts where Inesa lives, is drippy. It is wet and moldy and rotten. It isn't sustainable, and the floodwaters are reaching higher every year. The soggy atmosphere mingled with a sort of environmental doomsday undercurrent creates a great backdrop for a dystopian regime.
Cyclical Poverty	Though I've complained that this book doesn't really hold a critique of the contemporary social world, it does at least nod toward one. So I can give it kudos there. There's a certain cyclical nature to poverty in a world run by oligarchs, oligarchs who want and need an impoverished class to exploit. And I think there's something particularly interesting about setting this book in the waterlogged remnants of Appalachia as well, if we've got poverty on the mind... It's hard to get out of debt once you're in it, and it's even harder when the world is designed to keep you there.
Media Frenzy	Another compelling component to the backdrop of this plot is the absolute media frenzy that's happening during this bloody Gauntlet. Online chatter can't keep up. Streamers are live-reacting. Interviews comingle with merch drops, and it all feels very familiar... and very end-of-the-world. There's a sort of reluctance in the publishing world to acknowledge the power that this form of digital-age media (livestreaming, social media content creation, et cetera) has, and I like to see it acknowledged here in this book. Maybe our written work should do more to capture this facet of contemporary life.

CONS

As much as I liked some of the background components of this book--the climate catastrophe, the cyclical debt--the actual, main dystopian crux of this story didn't make sense. In The Hunger Games, there's a lot of groundwork laid to make it make sense that people would watch children die on television. There's severe dehumanization of the lower classes. There's very strong propaganda. And there's competent leadership manipulating human impulses. This book doesn't have any of that. I buy the cycles of debt. I buy, to some extent, being willing to sell yourself (or your closest kin) to relieve yourself of that debt. But I don't buy people watching it. And I don't really buy the debt itself, not fully, because it doesn't seem like the poor here are providing anything to the company that's keeping them in debt. The Capital needs the districts, because the districts provided resources and labor. Caerus doesn't need these outliers because they're just going more into debt with every purchase (i.e. not providing any sort of capital to the company), and they're not returning any labor at all, except for the occasional blood sacrifice to the Lamb's Gauntlet. So... What? Why would Caerus want these debtors around? I don't get it.	Nonsense
This book is as much a love story as it is a dystopian survival competition, and there's honestly a lot that gets lost in the shift between these two plots. Because the "love story" as it exists makes no sense. At least not with how the characters are initially set up. The motivations here, the way they suddenly shift to allow the romance to blossom, just doesn't feel consistent. There's character development, and then there's rapid character assassination to shove them into a romance. And this book is definitely the latter. And the motivations of those in the background working to keep the actual competition plot alive similarly make no sense. I just couldn't figure out why any of these characters would be doing any of these things, and that... Well, that's a problem.	Motivations?
There's a commonly held misconception about mutation, about evolution, that springs from the idea that we're constantly evolving. And, I mean, we are. Like, as a whole. Not on an individual level. So the fact that this book perpetuates the myth of evolution at an individual level just irritated me. Fast-acting evolution like that just isn't a thing? No scientific study has ever said it is a thing? It really doesn't matter how much radiation one is exposed to. You're getting cancer, not becoming a new lifeform. But you know what? I could have forgiven this if the author made up some excuse. If Ava Reid just thought this was a cool element to add to the world, the mutating creatures out in the wilderness, and gave some slapdash reason why they're all evolving so quickly, I would have let it slide because this is a book. This is fiction. Anything can happen, even if that anything doesn't reflect real life. But there's no justification whatsoever. It's just a flimsy plot point propped up by bad science, and I don't like that.	Mutation Misunderstanding

Rating

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
5/10

Fans of Julianna Baggot's Pure will like this new world of gnarly mutations. Those looking for their next dystopian fix after Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games will like this new deadly, not-so-voluntary competition.

Details Publisher: HarperCollins Date: March 4, 2025 Series: N/A Add to Goodreads Buy it HERE

Note: I was provided with an ARC by the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions here are my own.