These Violent Delights (2020)
These Violent Delights is a 2020 new york times bestseller book written by Chloe Gong.
Shanghai, 1926, loud with jazz and cheap with blood. Juliette Cai comes home a former flapper to take her place as heir of the Scarlet Gang, whose only equal is the rival White Flowers. Their heir is Roma Montagov, the boy who was Juliette's first love and first betrayal. A madness starts spreading through both gangs, a contagion the city blames on a monster in the water. To keep any Shanghai standing, the two enemies have to work together. Chloe Gong sets Romeo and Juliet loose in a city already tearing itself apart.
Quick answers
What is These Violent Delights about?
Shanghai, 1926, loud with jazz and cheap with blood. Juliette Cai comes home a former flapper to take her place as heir of the Scarlet Gang, whose only equal is the rival White Flowers. Their heir is Roma Montagov, the boy who was Juliette's first love and first betrayal. A madness starts spreading through both gangs, a contagion the city blames on a monster in the water. To keep any Shanghai standing, the two enemies have to work together. Chloe Gong sets Romeo and Juliet loose in a city already tearing itself apart.
When was These Violent Delights published?
These Violent Delights was published in 2020.
Who made These Violent Delights?
These Violent Delights was written by Chloe Gong.
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A few thoughts on These Violent Delights
Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet matches both the source play and the neon-gangland energy Gong is after. For the setting, Peaky Blinders trades the same currency of family crime syndicates, sharp clothes, and lovers on opposing sides. Both keep romance and violence in the same hand.
Star-crossed heirs of rival powers forced together
Juliette and Roma grew up on opposite sides of Shanghai's gang war before love complicated things, and these keep that same rival-heirs dynamic front and center. Romeo + Juliet gives Gong's source text its operatic treatment, Peaky Blinders trades tongs for a crime family running its own turf war, and The Cruel Prince, The Wicked King, and Serpent & Dove all pair enemies who end up bound together.
Doomed couples whose families would rather they never met
Juliette and Roma grew up drilled to hate each other before they had a choice in the matter, part of a long line of romances built on inherited enmity. Twilight and New Moon run the same family-versus-family tension through vampires and werewolves, Beautiful Creatures does it with warring covens, and Fallen and Shadow and Bone both put their couple on opposite sides of a divide neither chose.
Big, immersive YA fantasy series to fall into next
These Violent Delights runs across a duology thick with court politics and blood debts, and readers who want more of that same scale have plenty of runway. A Court of Thorns and Roses trades gangs for fae courts without losing the intrigue, Throne of Glass builds a whole continent's worth of maneuvering around one lethal heroine, and Caraval and Legendary wrap their own family stakes in equally elaborate magic.
Fractured cities where picking a side isn't really optional
Shanghai in 1926 splits along gang lines the same way these stories split their world into factions, districts, or types, and Juliette and Roma were born assigned to opposite camps before the plague started spreading. The Hunger Games sorts its population by district and use, Divergent does it by temperament, and The Maze Runner and Uglies both trap their casts inside systems built to control how people turn out.