TandeWrites

This was another highly anticipated read for the year, and I read it on release day because I got lucky with the library digital hold queue, but have spent every day since gathering my thoughts. It’s described as sapphic The Last of Us meets Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, so obviously I had to read it and relive my teenage dystopian fever dream.

By encouraging massive accumulations of debt from its underclass, a single corporation controls all aspects of society. Those with enough debt are forced to sacrifice a loved one for the Lamb’s Gauntlet, a livestreamed assassination which is always a bloodbath for the impoverished debtors. When Inesa learns that her mother has offered her as a sacrifice, at first she despairs, 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 her hunter, Mel, with a reputation for mercilessness, this is a game she can’t afford to lose. She desperately needs redemption after she broke down on the livestream during her last gauntlet and has since been haunted by painful flashbacks. As Inesa is pursued across the wasteland, she begins to question if there’s more to life than survival, and Mel wonders if she’s capable of more than killing. And both wonder if, against all odds, they might be falling in love.

Ava Reid is an author that I have a seemingly complicated relationship with because I tend to enjoy every other book, at least out of the ones I read. I DNF’d The Wolf and the Woodsman. I think I’ll love Juniper & Thorn. I loved A Study in Drowning. I loathed Lady Macbeth. And now I think I like Fable, but very tentatively. It’s a sapphic enemies-to-lovers dystopian romance about a girl who is chosen for a livestreamed death gauntlet and the ruthless assassin tasked with hunting her. It’s a love letter to The Hunger Games (and other classic young adult dystopian books), and to queer teens and grown-up fandom kids. I found Fable to be one of the more intriguing dystopian / cli-fi / post-apocalyptic novels I’ve read since the original boom in the early 2010s. It truly taps into the nostalgia from that era, combining bleakness and attempted rebellion and desperate hope in a world that is one minor inconvenience from falling apart.

I quite enjoyed both of the protagonists from this book, which is great as we spent a pretty even split of time in each of their heads. Their voices were distinct—Inesa’s more flowery and Mel more clinical—and their narration mirrored their spoken dialogue, so it was easy to settle into first-person POV switching without being confused about characters. I think the thing I love the most about Ava Reid’s writing across all of her works (whether or not I enjoyed them individually) is that she shows the strength of emotion and finding power in feeling “too much”. Mel is someone who craves deep connection despite her upbringing secluding her from it, and she has a refusal to be the thing the entire world wants to view her as. Her traumas are used against her constantly by the people who are her caretakers, and her role as an livestreamed assassin means she is always being watched by the media and seen as an entertainer rather than an individual, and these are things that make her voice that she doesn’t feel attached to reality or at home in her body as nothing that makes her “her” really belongs to her anymore.

The romance is cute, especially due to the differences between Inesa and Mel, and how they are forced to trust each other in order to survive. However, the pacing of the book did make some aspects of the relationship fall flat for me, because the jump from enemies to lovers happened very quickly. The in-between stage, where they’re supposed to be almost-friends and reluctant allies, happened…minimally. I liked both of the characters on their own, and I liked the potential of their romance, but I would’ve enjoyed it more if it had been fleshed out more extensively, especially that middle stage.

In my opinion, the romance is prioritised over the dystopian, so some of the world-building takes a backseat for me to the point where I would’ve willingly sacrificed some elements of the plot to learn more about this world. Why did it end up this way? What are the other countries doing? The part of the world we’re exploring is called “New Amsterdam”, and it talks a little about a nearby area called “New England” and an off-grid area in between, but I need to know if there was a war or solely a climate crisis or any knowledge other than the fact that a big corporation has taken over…everything. We are drip-fed some interesting elements of the world through Inesa’s life in the pre-gauntlet chapters of the book. She works as a taxidermist and, due to the flooding in her town, travels by raft along with many of the other people living there. She specifically taxidermies non-mutated creatures that her brother hunts because there’s a higher price for non-mutated ones, but this is still a concept that I wanted explored deeper. All animals (mutated or not) just exist in the world and don’t have an impactful role in the story. But, overall, the world is desolate and bleak and a stark depiction of what our real-world potential future could be, with a faint thread of hope woven throughout, so I’ll give it points for the blend of real-world issues.

And, like many other readers, I have complicated feelings about the ending, something Ava Reid herself knew would be polarising. There’s some kind of vague uncertainty about whether it’s trying to be open for a sequel or if it’s trying to be ominous or tragic or mysterious, but I didn’t like it no matter what it was trying to do. To me, it felt lacklustre, and it almost undid anything I enjoyed about preceding events. 

Above everything else I’ve had to say about this book, I hope that the young queer kids who are scared of the state of the world find their way to it. I hope that a book where the main girls are (in some way) saved by their open and determined love for each other can be a spark of hope in the present-day darkness. Ultimately, this is what Fable is about.