Wicked Lovely

Wicked Lovely, by Melissa Marr, is about a girl who can see fairies. One of these, the Summer King, sees her and decides he wants her to be the Summer Queen. She spends most of the book trying to get him to leave her alone.

It starts off interesting. I like the bit of a change-up that the mysterious magical guy that is relentlessly pursuing the girl is actually not the one she wants, and she does everything she can to get him to leave her alone. And I’m kind of curious how it will go from here, after how it ends. But there’s just so much sex in the story, and that puts me off. The fairies (aside from Donia, so far) are all just ridiculously lascivious and hedonistic. I guess that’s what fairies traditionally are like, but it makes it supremely hard for me to actually like any of them. I thought when it started that we were meant to dislike Keenan, despite how he obviously doesn’t see himself as a bad guy, but reading further it seems that the author truly likes Keenan and wants us to like him, which is disappointing, considering what he’s like. Even Seth, the mortal, is known for sleeping around and admits to the girl he supposedly loves that he’s had lots of meaningless sex with girls that don’t matter, and all the reason he can give is to shrug and say, “Felt good. Drunk.” Which makes me really not like him very much (and yet the interview at the end of the book calls him “any girl’s dream guy”; please).

Not to mention the story doesn’t really make sense in some ways. If Seth lives in a couple train cars at the train yard, how does he have a kitchen area and a bathroom? You can’t tell me that train got hooked up with plumbing and electricity. And I can’t tell where this is meant to be set, but it’s somewhere that gets snow in the winter. That train car would turn into a freezer in the winter and an oven in the summer. And he’s got a snake, which would do even less well living in a freezer than he would.

And if Keenan needs to find his queen before coming into his power, why doesn’t Beira need a king to keep her full power? For that matter, why was the Winter Queen’s husband the Summer King, if the Summer King expects his wife to be the Summer Queen? And [spoiler] why does Donia not need to find a man to be Winter King before she can get her full power at the end [end spoiler]?

Then there’s the issue of the Summer Girls. These are mortal girls who decided not to take the test to see if they were the Summer Queen (because if they weren’t, they’d become the Winter Girl, which is portrayed as a pretty unpleasant existence). Summer Girls are basically the court bicycles. They’re the harem. They are at the sexual beck and call of not just Keenan, the king, but also his two advisers and all his guards. The fact that they want to have all that sex is not really such a mitigating factor as it seems, considering their personalities are forcibly changed when they become Summer Girls. One girl is mentioned as having been reluctant to have sex while mortal, but is much more ‘affectionate’ now. Oh, and they have no choice about becoming Summer Girls (other than the options to take the queen test or die). Once a mortal is chosen by Keenan, she becomes a fairy. No going back, no changing it, that’s her fate. So, these Summer Girls are basically mortal girls who were going about their lives until this jackass Summer King came along, made them fairies, and the best option they had was to get turned into the king’s mindless sex slaves. And there are 80 of them. And the book makes no negative mention of what is essentially one eternal mass date rape. And still, we’re supposed to like all these male characters.

The book’s well-written, and it has some original twists on some common YA fantasy themes, but I’m just very put off by the wanton sex (not to mention all the underage drinking, occasional bad language, and mentions of drug use), the fact that neither of the guys the main character is choosing between are at are desirable, and little things that we’re apparently supposed to ignore just because they’re cool or needed for the story even if they don’t make sense. I like the idea of Aislinn and Keenan having a sort of business partnership after this rather than a romance, but I’m afraid this will turn into a love triangle in later books, and I don’t care for that trope. It’s overused in this genre, and in my mind, it’s a lazy way to infuse conflict into a story which always only seems to draw out what is really a fundamentally quick moment of decision. Overall, I don’t recommend this book. Flat characters, too much sex, and too many things that just don’t make sense.

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