Book Chats: These Violent Delights

One of my personal favorite books that I have ever read is the These Violent Delights Duology by Chloe Gong. It consists of two books, These Violent Delights and Our Violent Ends. It is a retelling of one of the most classic Shakespeare plays, Romeo and Juliet. The plot follows two heirs to rival gangs in 1920s Shanghai who were once lovers, but are now enemies. However, when a monster emerges in the city, the two must work together to defeat it and restore safety to their city.

I initially started this book when my friend, Gabby Martins, who I will be talking to in this podcast, recommended it to me. I immediately fell in love with the story and the characters and it quickly became one of my favorite books. After I finished the book, Gabby and I spent hours talking to each other about who our favorite characters were and our predictions for the next book. As you can probably guess, when the second and final book Our Violent Ends was released last November, Gabby and I were the first people in line to buy it. We didn’t think the second book would be able to top the first one, but we were proven wrong. When we both finished the book, we immediately facetimed each other because we had to share our thoughts. Gabby and I both had so many little things we wanted to talk about from the book, and we ended up being on facetime that night for almost five hours. Over the past couple of months, we haven’t talked much about These Violent Delights, so we decided it would be fun to revisit our thoughts and share them with the EBHS students.

In this podcast, we will be discussing our favorite parts of the books in a spoiler free section, and a spoiler section. If you have not read these books yet and don’t want to get it spoiled for you, listen until our spoiler warning and come back once you finish the books. Click the photo below to listen: