“A Diabolic is ruthless. A Diabolic is powerful. A Diabolic has a single task: Kill in order to protect the person you’ve been created for.”
-S.J. Kincaid, The Diabolic
Nemesis was created to protect the daughter of a Senator: Sidonia. Sidonia is the reason for Nemesis’s whole existence. Now, in order to keep protecting her, Nemesis must become Sidonia and take her place in the palace of the Emperor. Her time in the court shows Nemesis how broken their society has become, as well as one thing never would have ever believed: there’s more humanity in her than she could possibly know.
This was a book that was highly advertised when it came out back in 2017, so I finally got my hands on it at the library. Since it’s a dystopia, and I’m interested in dysotpias, I figured it was about time I read it. I thought the book started out a bit slow, but as Nemesis learns more about society, the plot begins to pick up. A lot of the information about this new world is dumped on the reader at the beginning, but many of the aspects of this world feel fresh.
There’s also a lot of violence in this book that seemed to turn people off, but I thought it fit for the world that Kincaid has created. The opening scene shows Nemesis killing someone in order to show her worth to the family that wants to buy her. She’s been engineered to kill in order to protect the person that she’s connected to. The violence makes sense, in a world run by a family that literally kills each other to stay in power. Since this was originally intended as a standalone novel, the many deaths in the novel absolutely make sense. I’m curious to see where the story is taken in the second book.
Overall, I thought the action and character development were well balanced here, and Nemesis’s voice remained steady throughout the novel. She never wavered from who her character, despite learning new things about herself throughout the text.
4/5 stars