This Savage Song (Monsters of Verity Book 1)

So This Savage Song is part one of The Monsters of Verity and is about, in my opinion, really cool idea. It's a small setting, mostly around the city Verity. There are three types of monster: Malchai, Corsai and Sunai. As we progress the story, we learn about how they are born into the world, what they eat.

One big part is about how this is a human made issue but also a small kind of The Stand situation. We have Henry Flynn and his effort to defend the south part of the city against the monsters. There is a truce with Callum Harker who rather like a mob boss gets paid to protect the people in the northern part of the city.

The characters are interesting, although I'd say August, "son" of Henry Flynn, is the most deep, trying to figure out how he would become and feel human. Katherine, daughter of Callum Harker, on the other hand tries to get the approval of her father.

Of course, August' and Katherine's journey collide.

The first book is rather explaining the story, and characters with like the last third pushing the story in good pacing forward.

This Savage Song was a great read and while City of Nightmares and Cage of Dreams were brilliant urban fantasy books in my opinion, This Savage Song and it seems the Monster of Verity series in itself is a great other take on monsters creeping in two sides of the same city and what people are able to do and create because of that.

I really enjoyed the idea of monsters and how they are born into the world. The features of Sunai especially are really cool and support their roles as kind of inquisitors of sinners.

The characters are also great. It focuses a lot on a small set of people but it's fun to read and follow them to find their places in a broken world.

The ending was even for me quite easy to anticipate. Still I quite liked the world building and characters to overlook the (maybe intentionally) weak plot twist.