We’ve reached the end of the road at last for the Villains series, a conclusion thirteen years in the making, arriving eight years after the second installment. I found the Villains series after reading one of Schwab’s previous series, and remember eagerly awaiting Vengeful’s arrival, so finally saying goodbye to this series is deeply bittersweet.
Victorious is narrated by Jeremy Arthur who returns from the previous two installments. Personally, I’d listen to him read me the phone book and was so excited to find out that he came back to see this series off. I’ve gotten so used to how he voices Victor, Eli, Syd, Mitch, and the rest of the series crew that I think the audiobook would’ve felt incomplete without him. I feel like he always does a great job of making each character distinct, and I never feel like I lose track of which character is speaking or narrating while listening to him.
Victorious brings Victor, Syd, Mitch, Dol, June, and Eli’s stories to a close as they prepare to face their biggest threat yet. Victorious picks up in the immediate aftermath of Vengeful, and you need to have read both Vicious and Vengeful to understand what’s going on in Victorious.
I found the flow of the audiobook slightly hard to follow at first as the narrative, like Vicious and Vengeful, does a lot of jumping back and forth through time. I ended up keeping track of when each chapter was taking place in a note on my phone to help keep the timelines straight.
As the finale of a thirteen-year-long series, there’s a lot that I can’t say because everyone deserves to experience letting the story unfurl the way VE has carefully crafted it to fall. I wasn’t the biggest fan of Vengeful’s Marcella plotline, so when Victorious teased an enemy no one could have forseen, I was a bit nervous. Overall, I feel like Victorious is more evenly paced than Vengeful, and even though while reading there were times I was desperate for a break from certain POVs, by the end, I was grateful for the way the center of this book was structured. While most of the book is set in a mix of three years post-Vengeful and immediately post-Vengeful, we do get some really creative glimpses into both Syd, June, and Victor’s pasts.
I had to really sit with this story and the end of this series for a few days to find my words, because so much happens in this book. I’m really satisfied with the ending of this series, and I don’t think there’s any other way to have brought it to an end. Seeing Syd in particular’s journey as a 21 year old woman in a fourteen year old’s body and how time has and hasn’t changed her as she’s matured was an arc I found particularly satisfying to follow. She really comes into her own in this one, which I appreciate after she was somewhat sidelined in Vengeful.
If you’ve listened to either of the previous novels and enjoyed them, I’d highly recommend letting Jeremy Arthur carry you through the story. However, if you found juggling the competing timelines or the variety of POV characters difficult in either of the previous books, I’d recommend sticking with print or an ebook for the finale.
This book is a love letter to VE’s career and the way that readers have been able to find something worth connecting to in Victor and Eli’s story for the past thirteen years. If you were lukewarm on Vengeful, I’d still recommend giving Victorious a shot because for the most part I found that Victorious avoided a lot of what I struggled with in Vengeful. What a way to send these characters and this story off, and what a privilege to have gotten to make them a part of my life for the past nine years.