Spectacle by Rachel Vincent - REVIEW

Spectacle (Menagerie #2) by Rachel Vincent

Publication Date: May 30th, 2017

Publisher: Mira

Genre: Urban Fantasy

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Synopsis:

When their coup of Metzger's Menagerie is discovered, Delilah and her fellow cryptids find their newly won freedom brutally stripped away as they are sold into The Savage Spectacle, a private collection of "exotic wildlife." Specializing in ruthless cryptid cage matches, safari-style creature hunts and living party favors, the Spectacle's owner, Willem Vandekamp, caters to the forbidden fetishes of the wealthy and powerful. At the Spectacle, any wish can be granted—for the right price.

But Vandekamp's closely guarded client list isn't the only secret being kept at the Spectacle. Beneath the beauty and brutality of life in the collection lie much darker truths, and no one is more determined than Delilah to strip the masks from the human monsters and drag all dark things into the light.

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Thoughts:

I read the first book in this series, Menagerie, several years ago and found it so utterly unique and entertaining but it still took me a long time to pick up Spectacle. So where do I begin…?

It was a relatively smooth transition back into the world of Menagerie. Vincent brought back just enough details and elements of book 1 to re-orientate me to the world. I enjoyed the snippets of news articles that she established in the first book but found they didn’t quite play out as well in Spectacle. We also get an interesting prologue for the origin of a main player that turns out to be relatively pointless in the end which was unfortunate.

The plot was where I had the biggest issue. The only purpose it seemed to serve was to get Delilah into a certain situation for a (hopeful) payoff in book 3 but it seemed that nothing that happened really mattered for the most part. The only purpose it seemed to offer was as a gratuitous outlet for some seriously messed up scenarios. One of the most important elements wasn’t even on page due to convenient memory loss (one of my least favourite tropes in any medium) but that did not stop Vincent from adding some fairly disturbing content.

Spectacle also tried to follow Menagerie’s lead in terms of adding multiple POV’s but this time there really didn’t seem to be a point. Aside from Delilah and Gallagher, there was no benefit to having anyone else’s perspective except to say ‘Hey, remember us? We’re here too!”

Overall I was pretty disappointed with this one but, as this is only a trilogy, I do still want to know what happens following the ending. In the end, I don’t think that this book even really needed to happen as it offered only the bare minimum of story progression.