Monstrous Design Book Review
From Goodreads: 1794, London: Camille and Al are desperately hunting Olympe’s kidnapper. From the glamorous excesses of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens to the city’s seedy underbelly, they are caught in a dangerous game of lies and deceit. And a terrible new enemy lies in wait with designs more monstrous than they could ever imagine… Can Camille play on to the end or will she be forced to show her hand?
In Paris, the Duc is playing his own dangerous games. With Ada in his thrall, old loyalties are thrown into question. The Battalion are torn apart as never before, and everything – Ada’s love for Camille, her allegiance to the battalion itself – is under threat.
Hi everyone, and welcome to another book review!
I’ll start by saying thanks to Netgalley and Head of Zeus for my review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
I really enjoyed Dangerous Remedy, the first book in this series. There was a lot to admire about the novel, and while I had a couple of issues with the plot in retrospect, it was a very entertaining read.
Monstrous Design follows in the same vein. There’s two different settings in this book, since the characters have split up. I think I preferred reading Camille’s and James’ POV chapters a little bit more, just because it felt as though the bulk of the plot took place in the London setting. While Ada is a great character, the French setting didn’t seem to have much going on, so her chapters felt a little slower. Although towards the end, things get a bit switched up and suddenly Ada’s chapters become a lot more complex. I like that the author plays with her character and her personality quite a bit. I can’t say too much about it if I want to avoid spoilers, but I think there’s a lot of development and exploration. A lot of it is driven by the fact that a lot happened with Ada and Camille’s relationship in the last book- Camille’s fiance James turned up, and Camille hadn’t mentioned anything about him to Ada. While they felt tentatively okay towards the end of the previous novel, Camille going to London to rescue Olympe from James without Ada there makes things between them quite a bit more tense. This tension feels pretty realistic, and I like that the pair are still shippable, even though there’s a lot going on between them. There’s still a sense that they care about each other, and I think this demonstrates some of the real issues that relationships can go through, even when two people want to be together.
Similarly, James is quite an interesting perspective character. I thought, the way that the previous book ended, that he was just going to be another antagonist in this one, but he had a lot of complicated feelings and mixed ambitions and things that made him a lot harder to figure out. I enjoyed his chapters quite a lot, even though I thought some of the stuff he was involved in was perhaps a little bit weird.
Which kinda brings me to one of my main gripes about the book and the series as a whole- the electricity experiments. While I do think that the science adds a lot to Olympe’s character and making her sympathetic, the science feels very loose and you sort of have to suspend your disbelief quite a bit throughout the books. It felt even more unrealistic in Monstrous Design. I don’t know how I feel about it. In one sense, I can forgive books for having fantastical or sci-fi elements to them, after all I mostly read fantasy books. But this one keeps getting pushed as a kind of historical fiction, and it just doesn’t quite hit the mark because of that for me. It feels like it’s trying to be a lot of genres at once, and I’m not sure it entirely succeeds.
Speaking of Olympe, by the end of the first book, I really liked her character, and so I was very keen on the Battalion finding her to rescue her again. Olympe is very sympathetic. Because of her electricity, she’s spent a good portion of her life being experimented on, and so her agency and ability to stay free from further experimentation is very important throughout the story. I kind of wish, in some ways that the plot had just sort of focussed on this. In the first novel, the motivations of the characters, and the threat of both the resistance and those trying to restore the monarchy felt very real, because we could see it through the lens of Olympe’s character. Since she’s in London though, the Batallion’s motivations and sense of stakes in the tensions between the two factions feels less intense. Several times throughout the novel, I found myself wondering why they cared about the situation in France anymore, and why they still wanted to stop the Duc. It didn’t feel like it mattered anymore, in part because those personal stakes were removed. I know all of those players still continue to be a threat to Olympe’s safety, but at this point, that threat feels more removed. I hope the next book can keep the stakes and tensions that drew me into the first novel.
Overall, I’d give Monstrous Design:
The characters were great, and there was some added complexity there too, but the plot sometimes lagged in places, and I felt that the personal stakes in this novel weren’t really present, which sometimes made it hard to care about the dangers and choices the characters faced. I’m still looking forward to the next novel though!
Has anyone else read this book yet, or plans to? What did you think about it? Let me know in the comments section down below <3
