Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Book Review - Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely

Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr
Published by: HarperTeen
Publication Date: June 2007
Format: Hardcover, 328 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

This book is the first in the Wicked Lovely Series by Melissa Marr. I have to say, I'm really undecided about this series, I just started it and I really want to like the series but everything ended up too nice and neat at the end for my taste. The book revolves around Aislinn, a young women still at Catholic school who can see fairies, and not nice Tinker Bell happy fairies but evil degenerate fairies. She was raised by her grandmother who also has the gift, some might say curse. Her grandmother has strict rules and behaviour protocalls that Aislinn must adhere to, they all boil down to don't let the fairies know you know and keep your head down. But what's a girl to do when a fairy starts stalking her? She can only hide out at "best friend" Seth's abandoned train car for so long till she has to face the truth, she's loosing her mortality because of something stalker fairy boy did.

Now stalker fairy boy turns out to be Keenan, the Summer King who has had his powers bound by his mother, Beira, the Winter Queen (think Brea on Desperate Housewives, she has to have been the inspiration) and the world is getting colder and colder because of this. Now the King and Queen have a little wager, the cost, the women who Keenan falls in love with who aren't the Summer Queen, they either get turned into fairy nymphos or get turned into the Winter Girl, who suffers with cold to her very bones and being unable to be with Keenan. Anyway, Keenan thinks Aislinn is the Summer Queen, and of course she is and this accounts for her mortality leaving her, and there's lots of back and forth of destiny versus what the heart of a teenager wants. In the end the wicked witch (Beira) is defeated and Keenan has his Queen in title only, Aislinn's keeping her life as is, Seth included. And we learn the valuable lesson that when everyone is willing to compromise everyone wins, except the witch who must die.

It was ok, I feel cheated that everything ended up well for everyone, all the foreboding and angst, couldn't we get one person dead in the crossfire who didn't deserve it? I do like very bad fairies though. The concept that they aren't nice and sweet is appealing to me, I think that Terry Pratchett did it best in Lords and Ladies, likewise the episode of Torchwood "Small Worlds." The problem here is that while they are evil fairies, once Aislinn starts changing, she seems to think they aren't that bad, basically she ends up wearing fairy enhanced rose-tinted glasses...Also enough with boys who can glow already!
Final verdict...must read more to decide, this series could go either way, but start throwing in some real problems and some casualties, and we might have a good thing going.

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