Fable for the End of the World Ava Reid

by Ava Reid
Fable for the End of the World Published by HarperCollins on March 4, 2025
Genres: Young Adult Fiction / Action & Adventure / Survival Stories, Young Adult Fiction / Dystopian, Young Adult Fiction / LGBTQ, Young Adult Fiction / Romance / LGBTQ, Young Adult Fiction / Science Fiction / Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic
Pages: 384
Find the Author: Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Instagram
Goodreads

The Last of Us meets The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in this stand-alone dystopian romance about survival, sacrifice, and love that risks everything.

By encouraging massive accumulations of debt from its underclass, a single corporation, Caerus, controls all aspects of society.

Inesa lives with her brother in a half-sunken town where they scrape by running a taxidermy shop. Unbeknownst to Inesa, their cruel and indolent mother has accrued an enormous debt—enough to qualify one of her children for Caerus’s livestreamed assassination spectacle: the Lamb’s Gauntlet.

Melinoë is a Caerus assassin, trained to track and kill the sacrificial Lambs. The product of neural reconditioning and physiological alteration, she is a living weapon, known for her cold brutality and deadly beauty. She has never failed to assassinate one of her marks.

When Inesa learns that her mother has offered her as a sacrifice, at first she despairs—the Gauntlet is always a bloodbath for the impoverished debtors. But she’s had years of practice surviving in the apocalyptic wastes, and with the help of her hunter brother she might stand a chance of staying alive.

For Melinoë, this is a game she can’t afford to lose. Despite her reputation for mercilessness, she is haunted by painful flashbacks. After her last Gauntlet, where she broke down on livestream, she desperately needs redemption.

As Mel pursues Inesa across the wasteland, both girls begin to question everything: Inesa wonders if there’s more to life than survival, while Mel wonders if she’s capable of more than killing.

And both wonder if, against all odds, they might be falling in love. 

Review:

Fable for the End of the World is a true nod to the dystopian romance novels I grew up reading. It echoes Hunger Games, Maze Runner, and The Last of Us. In this fascinating dystopian world, Inesa lives with her family in the poorest part of the world, and participation in the lamb guantlet is mandatory. When Inesa is chosen, she has to survive and not be killed by a trained assassin angel sent out by Caerrus, who controls everything. Melinoe is her angel; like all angels, she is extremely pretty and ruthless. And as a dystopia, the best dystopian stories make you look at their pages and say, “wow, that’s bleak,” and then look up at the world around you, and you cringe as you see some of those things in reality. Taking the things we can already see happening all around us and pushing them to extremes, Fable shows us a young woman who routinely travels through her town by rowing a boat up and down flooded streets and the literal geographic inequality it creates between those who can afford to live upstream of the flooding and those who can’t in a world ravaged by climate change; another who is groomed and hand-crafted to the level of perfection demanded by the ruling class, and yet whose biggest flaw remains that despite this she is still human; a corporation headed by the wealthiest people in the world that is so all-consuming and all-controlling you’re not quite sure what counts as corporation and what counts as government; a society so transactional that it is seen as a kindness to ignore our neighbors in need of help, lest they become indebted to us. Buried in this dystopian novel, the gauntlet is the story’s heart, and Inesa is desperate to escape the angel Melione, who is on her trail. Her brother is on the run with her, and they are heading north towards hope. Melione and Inesa’s relationship is strained, but it becomes so much more as the overpowering theme of hope and love can help you survive even the most extreme situations.

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