Their Vicious Games is just a phenomenal book. This is a cutting satire, providing social commentary on privilege, power, and the ways blood will be shed to maintain the status quo.
Often when books are marketed as a cross between various other media, my expectations are raised sky-high and they do not always quite live up to the comparisons being made. Their Vicious Games bucks that rule, encapsulated in the marketed cross between Squid Game and Ace of Spades. I would add another comparison from my personal top-tier recommendations: the film Ready or Not. Joelle Wellington effectively skewers that bubble of high class society, enmeshed in generations of privilege and power. This is a book that takes no prisoners. It is blood-thirsty, vicious and violent, with hellscape, Saw-like contraptions of death and destruction. At the same, there are some incredible moments of dark humour.
However, this is also a book about complicity in those same structures of power and privilege. It asks what you would sacrifice to gain those vaulted positions and really who you would become to get there. That is the integral question throughout the book. Adina must face up to what she would lose and how much blood she is willing to spill. There is also the constant question of whether she would ever truly be accepted. I loved how intersectional Wellington’s examination of this question is, weaving in discussions around class, race and even some sexuality subtext. These are important influencing factors, which culminate in some scenes that definitely fit into the ‘good for her’ genre of media that leaves you with an uncomfortable pit in your stomach.
Adina is an intelligent and genuinely kind person, who I instantly connected with. She is driven partially by love for her family and friends. Of course, I absolutely loved her. At the same time, she is not always a good person; sometimes she is selfish and manipulative. This feels like a survival strategy honed from years of mistreatment and the pressure cooker environment of the Finish. Also, I had a keen sense of why shouldn’t she try to survive by any means possible? This is a competition where the stakes are literally life and death, so some morally grey actions make complete sense. There is that sense of grit underneath her fingernails and a fire in her belly. She will get what she wants from this world, after all, it owes her. Black girls are often pigeonholed and not allowed complexity in their representations in the media. Adina should not be some perfect, untouchable pinnacle of morality. She should be as flawed and messy as any other teenage character, yet alone one placed in the ivory towers’ own twisted version of The Hunger Games.
A shoutout must also be given to the character of Saint, whose own narrative is one I would love to read someday. She equally has her own ulterior motivations, but there is a sense of genuine friendship there. In a world determined to squash both her and Adina, they keep going, often just to spit in their faces. There is a level of spite in their continued survival that the Finish is determined to annihilate. I loved how much female rage Wellington infuses in this book. This is a book incandescent with anger, ready to tear the world apart and remake it anew.
Wellington leaves scorched earth in her wake with this biting, bloody, and brilliant satirical take-down. Their Vicious Games is exceptional and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Their Vicious Games is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of July 25th 2023.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
A Black teen desperate to regain her Ivy League acceptance enters an elite competition only to discover the stakes aren’t just high, they’re deadly, in this searing thriller that’s Ace of Spades meets Squid Game with a sprinkling of The Bachelor .
You must work twice as hard to get half as much.
Adina Walker has known this the entire time she’s been on scholarship at the prestigious Edgewater Academy—a school for the rich (and mostly white) upper class of New England. It’s why she works so hard to be perfect and above reproach, no matter what she must force beneath the surface. Even one slip can cost you everything.
And it does. One fight, one moment of lost control, leaves Adina blacklisted from her top choice Ivy League college and any other. Her only chance to regain the future she’s sacrificed everything for is the Finish, a high-stakes contest sponsored by Edgewater’s founding family in which twelve young, ambitious women with exceptional promise are selected to compete in three mysterious the Ride, the Raid, and the Royale. The winner will be granted entry into the fold of the Remington family, whose wealth and power can open any door.
But when she arrives at the Finish, Adina quickly gets the feeling that something isn’t quite right with both the Remingtons and her competition, and soon it becomes clear that this larger-than-life prize can only come at an even greater cost. Because the Finish’s stakes aren’t just make or break…they’re life and death.
Adina knows the deck is stacked against her—it always has been—so maybe the only way to survive their vicious games is for her to change the rules.
