Title: Fable for the End of the World
Author: Ava Reid
Genre: Young Adult, Science Fiction, LGBTQ
Publisher: HarperCollins
Source: BookSparks
Format: Hardcover
Release Date: March 4, 2025
Rating: ★★★★
Goodreads Synopsis:
The Last of Us meets The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in this standalone dystopian romance about survival, sacrifice, and love that risks everything.
By encouraging massive accumulations of debt from its underclass, a single corporation, Caerus, controls all aspects of society.
Inesa lives with her brother in a half-sunken town where they scrape by running a taxidermy shop. Unbeknownst to Inesa, their cruel and indolent mother has accrued an enormous debt—enough to qualify one of her children for Caerus’s livestreamed assassination spectacle: the Lamb’s Gauntlet.
Melinoë is a Caerus assassin, trained to track and kill the sacrificial Lambs. The product of neural reconditioning and physiological alteration, she is a living weapon, known for her cold brutality and deadly beauty. She has never failed to assassinate one of her marks.
When Inesa learns that her mother has offered her as a sacrifice, at first she despairs—the Gauntlet is always a bloodbath for the impoverished debtors. But she’s had years of practice surviving in the apocalyptic wastes, and with the help of her hunter brother, she might stand a chance of staying alive.
For Melinoë, this is a game she can’t afford to lose. Despite her reputation for mercilessness, she is haunted by painful flashbacks. After her last Gauntlet, where she broke down on livestream, she desperately needs redemption.
As Mel pursues Inesa across the wasteland, both girls begin to question everything: Inesa wonders if there’s more to life than survival, while Mel wonders if she’s capable of more than killing.
And both wonder if, against all odds, they might be falling in love.
Review:
This book was such an intense and emotional story. There was tension between every character, mostly because they were fighting to survive. This dystopian world doesn’t seem that far from our future reality now, with the way things are changing. I wasn’t sure how the story would end because there were so many possible outcomes and most of them were tragic. I would love to revisit these characters in another book one day to see what happens next!
Fable for the End of the World is a thrilling dystopian read!
Thank you BookSparks for sending me a copy of this book as part of the Winter Reading Challenge!
Content warnings: death, animal death, suicide, fire, gun violence, knife violence
Have you read Fable for the End of the World? What did you think of it?
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