I'm just going to get into this review in a somewhat rambly way because I'm a little frustrated that what I originally wrote was accidentally deleted. Twice. :(While I am a fan of Marr's Wicked Lovely series, I was not as in love with this book as I was with the first or the third. I suppose I miss Aislinn too much, because I found that Ani was only somewhat interesting, and the same could be said for Leslie in Ink Exchange. Perhaps it's due to the fact that I like Aislinn both as a character and I like her particular circumstances. If I could keep Aislinn as the focus of the story and have Leslie and Ani as prominent side characters, that would be awesome.
Ani's interesting because of her situation. She's got crazy powers but t his isn't really letting her easily choose a side (live with mortals or live wirh faeries) because neither side is really working for her to the fullest. She can hurt mortals too easily, and she's not strong enough to run with The Hunt. She can't have normal relationships with people, but she does, at the very least, have a few people that understand and care for her. I found her interesting, but I didn't feel very attached to her, so it was a slight relief when we got to Devlin's chapters.
Devlin is extremely interesting. The "brother-son" to Bananach and Sorcha, the first two faeries to have come into existence. He's constantly stuck in the middle of the things that the two sisters embody: a thirst for violence and a need for order. He chooses to remain as Sorcha's right-hand-man, or as he puts it, The High Queens Bloodied Hands, but he is still Bananach's brother, and so naturally he keeps secrets from her... which leads to my first real problem with this book.
Rae, formerly known as Katherine Rae O'Flaherty, is a girl from the 1800s who somehow stumbled in to Faerie without her body and ran into Devlin. She's basically like a ghost, except we have no idea how that happened. We don't really know where her body is, except that Devlin knows, and he's been keeping it safe for centuries now. By the end of the book, Rae still hasn't gone back to her body and there is no indication that she ever will. She can take possession of people's bodies, which she's done with Devlin and eventually does with Ani, but no more is mentioned of her body so we're left to assume she has no intentions of finding again. You would think that with Devlin finally becoming a king of his own court at the end, there'd be some resolution to restore Rae to her body, or at least figure out what would happen if they did, but nope. They're just going to deal with the issue that she's a ghost of sorts, and that's all.
Also, why does Rae dreamwalk? Why is it that she can get into people's dreams, link them together, influence events through them, and so on? Where is the explanation for basically all the highly convenient stuff that Rae does in this book? At the end of it all, it felt like she was more of a plot device than a real character. She brought Devlin and Ani together and she made it so that Sorcha could watch Seth in her dreams. Then she also made it so that Devlin knew to come back to Faerie because it was falling apart. We have the understanding that she deeply cares about Devlin, but it's possible she's outright in love with him. Is this going to be an issue in the future, now that Ani and Devlin are a couple? Or are they just going to maintain some weird threesome? That's what it seemed like by the end of the book, so I'm not really sure that I should bother expecting any conflict over this in the next book, Darkest Mercy.
But back to something I do really like. Bananach and Sorcha. First off, when I met these two, I was in love with their individual purposes in this world. Bananach is War embodied, and Sorcha is Logic, Order, and Reason. Bananach sees the threads of the future that could help her create more chaos, and Sorcha sees the same for opportunities to maintain order. They are pure opposites, and yet they are sisters, and it is believe that if one dies, so does the other, and every other faerie in the world goes down with them. I thought this to be generally really cool. I enjoyed the fact that ever since Sorcha chose to make Seth a faerie, she basically started becoming crazily irrational because of her attachment to him.
It was depressing and fascinating to read about the world of Faerie basically disappearing bit by bit because she refused to care about it anymore. It follows a theme in this series, of great and powerful faeries becoming deeply attached to humans, and then destabilizing their courts and their world because of it. Irial had this problem with Leslie, Aislinn had this problem with Seth, and now Sorcha too has this problem with Seth but it in a different form. It goes against the way that some, or most faeries obviously viewed mortals at the beginning of this series. There was this sense that faeries definitely thought themselves superior, yet now all, or almost all of the courts had monarchs deeply attached to a human that they were unwilling to give up on. It's an spin on the way a lot of YA paranormal novels these days have this sense of elitism amongst all the paranormals. Humans suck, and it's better when you're not human anymore. Granted, Seth chooses to become a Faerie, but not for the sake of being one, rather for the sake of staying with the girl he loved (who, by the way, had become a faerie herself against her will).
Anyway, onto my second problem with this book: the pacing and the ending. Or rather the pacing in combination with the ending. We start out knowing that Ani might be key to helping the Dark Court nourish itself, and then we're taken into the problem of someone like Bananach taking notice of Ani and deciding to use Ani as a way to kill Sorcha. Devlin steps in, goes on the run with Ani to keep her safe, but eventually they return because Faerie needs Seth back and because Ani's sister has been murdered by Bananach. A fight breaks out between Bananach and her Ly Ergs against the Dark King and the Hounds of Gabriel (the Dark King's right-hand-man). Ani, Devlin, and Seth make another run for it to Faerie in order to fix things there. And they do. Then they try to convince the Dark King to return his court to Faerie so as to balance out Sorcha, but he refuses. Ani and Devlin then create the Shadow Court, a court that will exist to balance Sorcha in Faerie and will keep her from entering the mortal world (as she was now intending to do, though I don't really understand why, and I don't get why it's so bad that she'd do this) and they will also keep Bananach from entering Faerie as well.
I won't go into too much detail, but the way this was all "fixed" seemed far too easy, and it was done very quickly. So many worries and conflicts throughout the book, and BAM! problems solved. Well, sort of? There's still the issue of Bananach, whom we last saw when she was fighting the Hounds. I imagine she will still be the main issue in the last book. One of the things that confuses me is that she stabbed Irial, so for a moment there he was very clearly going to die. But then Bananach mentions he doesn't have more than a fortnight.. but then when Devlin and Ani are talking to Irial later, he and Niall seem very casual about the whole situation. Is he dying, then? Should I be worried about a character I like, or will he be fine? I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be feeling here. Oh, and there's also the issue of Keenan having gone missing. Missing like someone kidnapped him? Or he ran off? Is it something to be really worried about, in the sense that he might be in danger? Or simply in the sense that his antics are putting his court at risk? It was mentioned so briefly that I imagine it'll be an issue in the next book, but I feel like Marr should've just waited to mention it at the beginning of Darkest Mercy instead.
At this point, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the series overall. I think the last book will have to be pretty solid in winning me over otherwise I'm going to continue to have conflicting thoughts about this series.
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