Thank you NetGalley and Dundurn for the eARC.
A thirteen-year old girl who's a bit of a loner is annoyed by a couple of bullying brothers. When she sees one as she's hiding in a tree, she accidentaLly kills him with a flying rock. It feels fantastic and she never gets caught. Thereby begins her career as a vengeance killer. She goes after people who are cruel to animals, the CEO of a company that is harmful to the environment, people she seems hazardous to humanity and the environment.
This is a surprising novella, quite different. I agreed with a lot of her musings about the state of the world, but where will it end...is she going to stick to her principles or become a thrill.killer? She's obviously very smart, very patient and knows how to evade justice, but my slight empathy started to take a hit towards the end. Some of her ideas about
where we as a people are heading for were quite thoughtful. A very interesting book, I definitely recommend it.

Thank you to NetGalley for a Kindle ARC of Of Vengeance.

I had no idea what to expect when I requested it but I'm happy my request was granted.

Of Vengeance is told from the POV of an unnamed female narrator, who accidentally killed a well known bully in her school.

She discovers, much to her growing surprise, how much she enjoyed the murder, and makes it her mission to target who she deems unworthy.

In this regard, she is very much like Dexter. No one would ever suspect her. She is pleasant to look at. She is educated. She has a decent job, a few friends. She blends in.

And she finds victims based on how cruel they are to animals and people, ignorant and baseless behavior, and plain despicableness.

On the other hand, she is not a sociopath, like Dexter. She knows full well what she is doing is wrong, yet she is not void of empathy. She mentions her parents, who provide her with unconditional love and says often she does not want to hurt them in any way, which is why she is so careful when she does what she does.

She tells the readers, briefly, of how she works; how she tracks her victims for weeks, even months, her vigilance and dedication to monitoring unsuspecting individuals; how she remains off the radar of Big Brother; how much people (in general) annoy her, how she prefers the company of animals and nature to loud, obnoxious, noisy people who disrespect the environment and the world in which we live in.

You can't help but like her; she's not afraid to speak her mind, and what some of us (most of us?) sometimes think about of the people we meet or read about in the papers or see on television.

The writing is straightforward; the tone dark, but not bloody or graphic.

This is worth a read for fans of Dexter or immoral characters.

My only caveat: too short a read.

This book was first published in 2017 in French and won the Indigenous Voices Award for prose. The English version is due to be released in September 2019. I wish to thank NetGalley and Dundurn Press for the advanced copy of the book in return for an honest review.

This work of literary fiction appears to be flawlessly translated into English. It is told in a non-linear fashion, and descriptions of the outdoors and nature are lyrical. It also delves deep into the mind of a young female psychopath.

It is narrated by the young woman in a stream of consciousness. She comes from a loving family and describes herself as being average and with innocuous features, solitary, and unlikely to be noticed. She enjoys nature walks, picking berries, stealthily walking neighbourhood dogs, and watching or spying on people. One day when she was aged 12, she was watching an unpleasant classmate from a concealed position and decided to scare him. She accidentally killed him and was never suspected. She decided she liked the thrill it gave her, and from this point decided to become a murderer. She employs careful planning and patience and her cold-blooded killings are untraceable.

She is proud of what she is doing, but regrets that she is unable to brag about her cleverness, thus winning the admiration of others for her crimes. She rationalizes she is doing the world a favour by ridding it of people that don’t deserve to take up air or space. Among her victims are a reckless driver, a man just released from prison for rape, and the CEO of an energy company causing environmental degradation.

In closing, she describes a startling and horrific scene with such calmness and detachment that I was futilely hoping it was just her dream. In my opinion, I might have enjoyed the book more if it had been presented in a more traditional, linear structure, with supporting characters more developed. Nevertheless, I feel that the author achieved her goal in telling this dark, well-written tale about the making of a cold-hearted killer and in describing her thought processes.

A deeply dark and highly mysterious story. This definitely lives up to the hype Quite hard hitting at times but told very well. Highly recommend