Discord's Apple

by Carrie Vaughn

[Amber (The Literary Phoenix)]

I kept going back and forth on Discord’s Apple.

I really loved the setting and parts of the story here. This book has a unique and interesting mixture of things – this is a dystopia, but there’s legends and mythology woven in. Discord’s Apple is the story of an ending, and I just found it… so refreshingly original in that way. Evie’s timeline, in particular, fascinated me. I loved this twist on dystopia, and seeing popular characters from mythology and legend appear was just… super cool, honestly. A novelty, but a fun one.

So the setting was super cool in the present. That said, there’s a few different POVs on a few different timelines. Vaughn is trying to tie in all aspects of the story, but Sinon’s history and the history of Evie’s family was, for me, so much less interesting than the present situation. While Sinon’s story was relevant, the family history felt like filler and that was a bummer. I just pushed through those ones.

The characters were… hmm. There wasn’t a whole lot of depth to most of them. I liked Evie well enough, and Sinon was… he was okay, depending on the scene. There was not a lot of depth to him, nor the villains. They were not bad, per se. They just weren’t memorable.

It was an easy read, though, which I really liked. Light, easy to breeze through when I did have the motivation to sit down and read at all. She writes well and while some things were a little cheesy and there should be a TW for off-scene rape and mentioning of that. There are little things that were not great and little things that were brilliant – I love the Storeroom.

It’s an interesting book to read, honestly. I would recommend it, because it is different and creative. The dystopia stuff is fantastic. It’s not perfect, but it’s interesting, and it’s different, and sometimes that makes a huge difference.