- Narration: Therese Plummer is credited alone for two alternating viewpoints, a girl performing hardness and a monster performing humanity, across just over ten hours.
- Themes: a divided city, monsters produced by violence, friendship instead of romance, inherited cruelty, the cost of a soul-stealing gift
- Mood: bleak, propulsive, more suspense than horror
- Verdict: one of the sharper young adult fantasy premises going, in a compact first half that expects you to read the second.
A city split down the middle, monsters that are made rather than born, and a boy who can pull a soul out of a person with a strain of music: this audiobook has one of the better premises on the young adult shelf, and Therese Plummer gets ten hours and nine minutes to hold it together. Kate Harker wants to be as ruthless as her father, who lets the monsters roam and charges humans for protection. August Flynn wants to be human, which is complicated by his being one of the monsters. Greenwillow Books published the recording in July 2016 as the first of two, under a series title, Monsters of Verity, that the description never uses.
The Review
The worldbuilding does the heavy lifting and it deserves to. Violence in this city has begun to breed actual monsters, which converts a familiar dystopian setup into something with a rule behind it, and the rule generates the plot rather than decorating it. One of the written responses begins laying out three kinds of monster before the text breaks off, which tells you the taxonomy matters to how the book reads. Verity is a place where an act produces a creature, and where a family can therefore be measured by what it has made. That is a stronger engine than most divided-city stories bother to build.
The pairing is the other reason it works. Kate has been expelled from her sixth boarding school and returns home to prove something to a father who is not interested; August is sent to watch her and would rather be almost anything other than what he is. The description promises heroes facing monsters from every side including within, which is the kind of line that means nothing until a book earns it, and the soul-stealing mechanism earns it, because the one thing August can do is the exact thing that marks him as what he does not want to be. The listing invites a comparison to Gotham and to the four Londons of the author's adult fantasy, and for once the comparison is apt about tone rather than about sales.
Comparisons do the selling on this listing rather than description, offering it to fans of Holly Black, Maggie Stiefvater, and Laini Taylor while stamping a bestseller line and a best-of-the-year mention above the plot summary. Comp titles are a blunt instrument and these ones aim at the wrong quality. What separates this novel from its shelfmates is not lyricism, it is cold logic: monsters here are consequences with a mechanism attached, and the book is more interested in the mechanism than in the mood. A listener arriving for atmosphere will find something more skeletal, and better for being so.
What Makes This Savage Song Worth Hearing
Two viewpoints alternating across ten hours is a specific demand on a single narrator, and Therese Plummer is credited alone. Kate and August have to stay separable in the ear when the chapters switch without warning, and one of them is a teenage girl performing hardness while the other is a monster performing humanity, which means both characters are already doing a voice. No dual-narrator production is credited and no second reader appears anywhere, so all of that separation has to come from one performer's choices.
The book is also short by fantasy standards and quick by any standard. Ten hours and nine minutes is one long weekend, and the structure is built out of alternating short chapters with hard cuts, which suits listening far better than a dense single-viewpoint narrative would. If you have been circling this author's work and want an entry point that does not require committing to a long series, the first of two books is a low-cost place to start.
The Caveats
Byline and description disagree about the author's name. The listing credits V. E. Schwab while the copy underneath refers throughout to Victoria Schwab, including in the sentence pointing you toward the adult fantasy. Both forms belong to the same writer, so this is a cataloging inconsistency rather than a mystery, but if you are searching for more of her work you will need to try both spellings, and a listener who only ever sees one of them may not realize the two shelves are connected.
Most prominent among the responses is one that is not a review at all. It reproduces the publisher's description almost word for word, opening with a rating line and the label synopsis, then pasting the copy from this same listing, with the whitespace collapsed so that the title runs into the author's name and the author's name runs into the word synopsis. Whatever the reader thought of the book is not there. Below it, a genuine four-star entry does the actual work, describing arriving skeptical, being caught by the idea of monsters who kill and eat people, and finding the result closer to suspense with a mystery in it than to horror. Two further entries are written in languages other than English and address a readership in other markets, so they sit outside anything I can weigh for you here. Of the three usable responses, one is a copy of the blurb, which leaves two.
The grades I would leave alone entirely. The counter reads four while five people are visibly present, and the displayed 4.3 resolves only under one rounding convention, so no arithmetic claim about it is safe to make. Note also that the publisher recorded here is a house whose name ends in Books rather than in Audio, a small reminder that most of the apparatus surrounding this recording was assembled to sell a hardcover.
The Right Listener for This Savage Song
Come to it if you want a young adult fantasy where the central relationship is not a romance, since the book is explicitly about whether two people can be friends or enemies and takes that question seriously. Come to it for a monster protagonist whose monstrousness is a real problem rather than a brooding aesthetic. And come to it if a ten-hour, two-book commitment is the right size for you right now.
Think twice if you want resolution inside one volume, because this is the first half of a pair and the description says so. Think twice as well if grim urban settings tire you, since Verity is unrelieved by design. Pass on it if you need your fantasy to explain its rules early, because the mechanism here is disclosed slowly and on the author's schedule rather than yours.
Is the This Savage Song audiobook a romance?
No, and deliberately so. The description frames the central question as whether Kate and August become friends or enemies, not lovers. Readers arriving from paranormal romance should adjust expectations. The tension between the two leads is built on suspicion and mutual usefulness rather than on attraction, which is unusual for the shelf.
Why is the author credited as V. E. Schwab in one place and Victoria Schwab in another?
The listing carries both forms: the byline uses initials while the description consistently spells out the first name. Same writer, inconsistent cataloging. It matters mainly when searching for more of her work, since the two forms can lead to separate shelves and you may miss half the catalog.
How many books are in the series and does this one end cleanly?
The description calls it the first of two, under the Monsters of Verity heading recorded on the listing. Expect an ending that closes this installment while leaving the larger conflict open. If unresolved arcs frustrate you, plan on the second book before starting this one.
Are the written reviews on this audiobook reliable?
Use them carefully. The most prominent one is the publisher's own description pasted in with a rating attached rather than an opinion, and two others are written in languages other than English for different markets. That leaves a single substantial English response, which is thin evidence by any measure.
