Menagerie by Rachel Vincent
My rating: 4/5 cats
this is my first rachel vincent book.
i’d heard good things about her, but always from readers who like urban fantasy or that kind of YA fantasy romance that i’m just not into. this book sounded like a departure from her usual style, and i’ve had a lot of luck with sideshow/carnival novels this year, so when i saw it listed as a giveaway on the reading room, i figured “might as well,” and then there was WINNING!!
but i did not expect to love it as much as i did.
because, yeah – it’s pretty much urban fantasy, BUT it’s urban fantasy with all of the romantic elements removed. which, since it’s the desultory romancey bits i don’t usually dig in urban fantasy, is like getting a box of lucky charms that is ALL MARSHMALLOWS!!
it takes place in an alt-version of our world where cryptids and human-cryptid hybrids walk among us. or, they would walk among us, but because of a few bad apples and some regrettable genocide, any creature even remotely supernatural can be legally hunted down and killed outright, thrown into unregulated facilities for study or punishment, sold to wealthy “most dangerous game” types to be shot for sport, or put into traveling circuses to terrify and delight a frequently hostile audience.
delilah’s living in oklahoma, in a bit of a rut and restless about it, when she receives a well-intentioned but clueless birthday present from her dull boyfriend brandon: tickets to metzger’s menagerie, where she finds herself an uncomfortable spectator to all manner of caged shifters, oracles, minotaurs, selkies, werewolves, ifrits &etc…
delilah’s always been fascinated by cryptids, but more in the biological/mythological way than the “let’s put it in a cage and poke at it with a stick” way. and on this occasion she witnesses such cruelty towards the caged and starved creatures that the injustice causes her to respond with a quite inhuman display of outrage.
which comes as quite a shock to the staff, the caged cryptids, delilah’s boyfriend and bestie, and delilah herself, who had no idea she was anything other than human all these 25 years.
and suddenly the freedom she has enjoyed her entire life, her plans for the future, her relationships and prospects and the very basic comforts of life are no longer rights to which she is entitled. now that she is legally a monster, all she has is a 4 x 6 steel cage in the menagerie, her wits, her simmering anger and her stubborn refusal to submit; she’s a dangerous combination of a woman with a big mouth, no self-defense skills, and no civil rights.
on top of the emotional turmoil of being caged and put in a position where anything can be done to her with impunity, delilah gets to experience further depersonalization because while it’s clear she is not quite human, her actual species remains unidentified.
so it’s all mystery and action and creature-fantasy and cage-rage and alliances and manipulation and it’s just a fun and completely addictive book, which sounds odd for a book about a woman imprisoned like a beast, but it’s got were-cheetahs so ppbblltt. i devoured most of it in one huge chunk without even meaning to. i’d intended to just curl up with it for a little bit but then i became so consumed with the atmosphere and the mystery of what could she beeeee?? and then it was like when you set those boundaries for yourself like “okay, i will have just one more bite of pudding” but it goes down so smooth, you have another and then another and before you know it there is no more pudding for anyone else. and you get kicked out of the grocery store.
to me, it was a fantastic combination of an original storyline, a setting that’s been delivering for me all year, secondary characters with all sorts of cool powers and traits and a heroine who is reasonably badass and fierce without becoming just a cliché of that type of heroine.
“Get her processed, then put her on the row. Tomorrow, start breaking her.”
His instructions echoed in my head.
Break me? Like a stick for kindling or like a pony for riding? Break me like a date, or like a heart, or like a promise?
In the end, it wouldn’t matter. I had no intention of being broken.
i definitely appreciate that for the most part vincent resists the temptation to make historical precedent-references to slavery or concentration camps and that she tells her own story without relying upon comparisons to real-world atrocities to give her situations weight.
i see the complaints of others, but i personally loved the multiple POVs, because although *yeah, yeah* the voices sounded very similar, the perspectives themselves were drastically different, determined by how much information the characters had, their individual experiences and backstories, and their actual physical limitations to communicating what they know, which leads to a lot of delicious frustration and was one of my favorite parts. along with all of the seeeeeecrets. and yeah, there are some implausibilities and things left unexplained, but the major questions have been answered. it ends in the perfect spot – where someone who doesn’t like it enough to pursue it into the second book has enough closure, but where people like me who are going to be ALL OVER that second book have a lot to look forward to.
questions and quibbles and actual spoilers so back off:
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