Tzippy's Reviews > Venom

Is it possible for a book to be underwhelming and horrifying at the same time?

Like many others, I was seriously anticipating Venom. YA murder mystery set in Venice during the Renaissance? How could that not be awesome?

I guess maybe if the main character is a privileged rich girl with a loving family whose biggest problem is that her life is too boring (and she complains about it. All. The. Time). And if her love interest, Falco, is every girl's fantasy: you know, the kind of guy who dresses her up like a prostitute, brings her to a brothel, and then leaves her to fend for herself -- and that's all before his awful secret is revealed. And the letters. Allow me to rant a bit about the letters?

So Cass (the main character) is engaged to Luca, who's apparently the boringest borington in all of Boringville (spoiler alert: he's not really). And he writes her these letters, which Cass puts off reading for the entire book, since she's sure they're going to be... well, have I overused the word "boring" yet? Anyway, like a quarter of this book is filled with Cass seeing the letters, feeling guilty for not having read the letters yet, and thinking, "Okay, soon I'll read them, really, I mean it this time." By the time Cass actually opens one of these letters, I was positive that it would contain, like, the authentic Coca-Cola recipe or something. At the very least, a proof for Fermat's last theorem. (I know, I know. Fermat's last theorem has already been proven. But it hadn't been when this book is set!)

(view spoiler)[Anyway, the letters are nothing of the sort. They just say blah blah blah, I miss you, don't wander around with strange guys. Unfortunately, they don't say, Be careful, my half-brother Cristian is a murderer and he's got his eye on you. Be more vague and unhelpful, Luca! (hide spoiler)]

So now let's move on to Falco's deep dark secret. You know, usually when a character has a deep dark secret, it's either A) something bad that happened to them when they were young, or B) something stupid they did when they were drunk that had enormous consequences. So, points for originality, Falco! Because his deep dark secret is...

(view spoiler)[He digs up corpses and uses them as models for his art! Including Cass's friend's corpse! (More on that later.)

Also, he sells some of the corpses to be used as medical cadavers. "But mostly, I did it for the art," he writes in a letter to Cass, and she immediately melts. Oh! He desecrated graves and stole dead bodies for the art! How romantic! That's totally not something a serial killer would say!

Cass's friend's body... well, he was involved in stealing it, but he doesn't know what happened to it. "Maybe it was used for artistic purposes," he says, as if that's supposed to be comforting.

Now, I don't want to come off as a person who doesn't appreciate art.

But.

Gross. (hide spoiler)]

If Cass and Falco were supposed to be ambiguous characters and this were supposed to be some kind of macabre psychological thriller, I could get behind that. But that would require depth that this book does not possess.

Aside from being unlikable, these characters are also underdeveloped. I never got a clear picture of any of the characters; not these three, not Cass's lady's maid Siena, not her friend Mada, not Mada's fiance Marco, not the dead friend Liviana (apparently she was "good"), not Cass's aunt, certainly not her dead parents. And nothing was really resolved by the end of the book. Left for the sequel, I suppose, but "something bigger is going on" is just not enough of a hook to get me interested in reading the next book of the series.

(Renaissance Venice might be enough of a hook, though. Oh, why do I do this to myself?)