These Violent Delights + Our Violent Ends by Chloe Gong
Review of These Violent Delights and Our Violent Ends by Chloe Gong
“Juliette breathed in and found her lungs to be horribly tight. Could she never be both? Was she doomed to choose one country or the other? Be an American or nothing?”
These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong (2020). Published by Margaret K. McElderry Books.
This is the first time I’ve ever merged a book series on my blog, but there is a first for everything, isn’t there? I bought a copy of These Violent Delights after hearing about it ever since it came out, and I follow Chloe Gong on social media.
I never read it because I personally do not care for YA novels, but what finally did me in was the fact I was at the Union Square Barnes & Nobles in New York City, saw an autographed copy, and promptly paid $20 for it because I was a sucker for the gold pen and smiley face she used in the book.
And then, when I arrived home in Maryland, book safely tucked away into my suitcase, I cracked it open and read it in about an hour and a half. Despite appearing larger than it actually is, this book did not take me long to read.
I’ll delve into the pacing a bit later, but because I was curious about the cliffhanger she ended the first book on, I sent a request to my library for the second book. I didn’t enjoy that book very much, but skipped to the end to figure out what happened only to discover I was exactly right about anything.
Onwards with the official review!
In 1920s Shanghai, where gangsters rule the streets, a new threat is looming.
Gong’s duo is told from the perspective of the female protagonist, Juliette Cai. She is the heir to the Scarlet Gang in Shanghai, but has just returned from spending time in New York City. The rumors about her say that she is ruthless and will cut a man to pieces if she wants, but since the reader is spending so much time in her head and POV, we learn quickly that we shouldn’t really believe the rumors.
All’s fair in love and war, and her grudge of sorts comes from Roma, the heir of the rival Russian gang. The two were once as thick as thieves—literally, perhaps—but that was all torn apart when Roma is apparently behind Juliette’s mother’s death.
The catalyst and driving force behind this story, though, is that there is a monster in Shanghai. The story never really goes too in depth as to how the monster was created, but it essentially releases all of these bugs that drive into someone’s scalp, thus rendering them mad enough to rip out their own throat.
Conveniently, none of the main characters are impacted by this, of course, and are never affected by all of this until the very end of the book, when Alisa gets infected and then Roma, in a moment of unsurprising tenseness, begins to claw his own throat out.
In the first book, Gong clearly excels at worldbuilding. That was the strongest part of these two novels—not the plot itself, but the world she creates with it. It feels like her vision of 1920s Shanghai, the details crisp and to the point.
There’s the underlying political tensions that are present in both books, albeit the second book obviously much more than the first, and there really is this seedy underworld. Gong subverts the myths of Romeo and Juliet in some ways, giving them more agency to the circumstances and also making the original tragedy a lot less controversial (aka: in the original Romeo and Juliet are dumb teens who decide they’re in love after briefly seeing each other).
The characters also have good chemistry with each other, although I was not a fan of the main pairing. I thought Marshall and Benedikt were a better pairing, and I liked Alisa as a character.
Roma and Juliette walk too much in circles around each other, as they’re paired up in order to try and solve the mystery of the monster, and that spirals even deeper in the second book. Rosalind and Celia also were some of the most interesting characters to me, so I can appreciate that Gong is going to create more work focused around them. Was she evil to end on a cliffhanger in Book One? Slightly.
This is where book two begins.
After Juliette pretends to kill Marshall, thus sparking the rage of the Russian gang and forcing Roma to swear off his forbidden love to the Scarlet heiress, all hell begins to break loose in Shanghai. Another monster begins to make an appearance on the streets, taking the form of a man, and has targeted attacks.
One of which almost kills Roma and Juliette because guess what? Roma’s scheming father decided to arrange the two must investigate the upcoming revolts. Roma clearly still hates Juliette but can’t bring himself to murder her in cold blood, bringing forth that romantic push and pull between the two.
The Benedikt and Marshall plot comes out full force here, too. I like that they get their time to shine, as it distracts from how repetitive Juliette and Roma are getting.
When you smash these two books together into one linear timeline read continuously, Roma/Juliette tend to get a tad boring in the long run because it’s the same storyline, set to the tune of Romeo and Juliet, unfolding again and again. They’re running in the same circle they created as teenagers, which can get tedious if you’re not too invested in the story.
The subplot that suddenly becomes a lot bigger in this novel is the actual historical events happening in this era. China is in a turbulent period at this point of time, and as Gong makes a lot of points about Shanghai being its own kind of beast full of foreigners, it is not immune to the events of the country it is nestled inside of.
The monster concept shifts towards internal gang strife and the politics of the Nationalists versus the Communists, which becomes sticky because the Russian White Flowers left Russia originally to get away from the Bolsheviks. And because this is Romeo and Juliet based, we can kind of know where this is going to end.
Around page 200, I honestly stopped reading. I could not handle the pacing of the two books combined, and the second book really began to drag after awhile.
I see the financial decision to split these into different books, as it makes the publisher and the author a ton of money. But did they need to be separate? I don’t think so. But even if they were the same book, Gong would have to completely switch up the pacing while also being consistent to keep the reader hooked. Book two is simply too slow.
Overall Thoughts
I did genuinely enjoy the series. It was a good effort from a debut author, especially one as young as Gong. I think she’s really good at writing, but there are some flaws in the books that made me lost interest. I wasn’t invested in Juliette and Roma as a couple, but instead them as individuals.
Their romance seemed a little too distant for me, which didn’t sell the relationship and thus I had no emotional impact when I found out they did. This was also fairly predictable. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it simply is not cup of tea.
I can also see why people find both of the protagonists unlikeable, as they’re rich kids running off of colonialism (there’s a critique of white people colonialism in the novel…but suddenly Roma being a part of that system is excused?) and uneven power dynamics. Let the factory workers usurp their families, honestly. Gong also needs to raise the stakes and liven the pacing at times.
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