A review by megancmahon
Before the Devil Breaks You by Libba Bray

adventurous challenging dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Spoilers!

Hoo boy. Where to begin?

  • MABEL. My poor girl. In the first two books, I didn't really like her that much - it felt like she whined too much about not being the shining star but spent too much time comparing herself to others and not enough time developing herself. But hey, she's 17! Who isn't like that at that age? In this book, I was expecting her to be so selfishly caught up in having her own thing that she sacrifices herself "to destroy the man" - but that wasn't what happened at all. She found herself and stayed true to it. I loved her by the end. Her death was heartbreaking.
  • The asylum scenes were appropriately and gut-wrenchingly creepy
  • THETA. My darling girl. I loved learning more about her past and seeing her development here. But I swear to god, if I have to read one more scene of a woman refusing to take revenge on her abuser "for her own sake" ONLY FOR THEM TO SWEAR REVENGE AND BECOME A MAJOR PROBLEM LATER?? I will go feral. That just felt kinda lazy, given that Bray is TOTALLY comfortable killing people off
  • Will's death felt a bit of an anticlimax for me. We still don't really know much about him, and I really wanna know how Rotke died! 
  • The main draw of this book is its discussions of history. I swear, this has some of the best prose on the history of America that I've ever read. "For we live in a haunted house" gave me goosebumps. The idea of the dead not being dead, and the past not being past, is one of the reasons I love to study history, and why these books are so enjoyable
  • Ling and Henry kinda fell to the wayside here, which is really too bad, because they got a lot of development in the last book
  • Boy, I started out hating Bill Johnson and then, as time went on, really empathized with him! Bray's character building remains unmatched
  • EXCEPT WHEN IT COMES TO JERICHO. my god. The character assassination of him that happened here just plain broke my heart. And it was lazy. If she really wanted to make Jericho unlikeable she could have just...had him sympathize with Jake Marlowe? But instead she turned him into an unwitting rapist?? In a way that was so clearly just meant to push Evie towards Sam
  • Relatedly, I found the love triangle quite trying in this one. Also, Evie needed to make up her mind. I love Sam, but this read very much like she only picked him because she found out that Jericho was awful, and not because she actually really liked him. It felt forced to me

Other than my above gripes I still loved it and devoured it and stayed up late to finish it. I'm so glad I'm reading these as an adult. I can't WAIT for the fourth.