Author: Mary E Pearson
Publisher: MacMillan
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
The Kiss of Deception shares its title with another novel billed as: "Swat-Secret Werewolf Assault Team 3 Everlasting Classic Manlove" which is why authors should take care in their titles! The way to sales is to distinguish your novel, not conflate it. But that's the problem with Big Publishing™: when you go that route, you effectively lose control of your work with regard to title, cover, and other areas.
That said, I had doubly-mixed feelings reading this one. I started out, even in the first page or two, wondering how long I was going to be able to continue reading it, because it began so poorly. That's not a good feeling to get on page one, and it's definitely not one with which you want to imbue your reader. After that, though, I began to get into it and enjoyed it, and that's when the author put several major roadblocks in my path.
The first of these was the nonsensical triple first person PoV telling of the story. This was amateur and confusing. One first person PoV is too much unless it's done really well, and I can see how a princess might do this, but to also have the prince who is chasing her, and the assassin tell the story in their own first person PoV? It doesn't work, and I call bullshit on that one. When authors use more than one 1PoV, they typically title the chapters with the name of the person who's narrating, but this isn't done here, and it makes for an unholy mess. It would seem that the reason this choice was made was that the author wanted to screw with your perception of which was the prince and which was the assassin, but both characters are so useless that in the end it makes no difference. They both, in their own ways, assasinate her after a fashion, and she deserves it!
I tried to ignore these and read past them, but by the time I was about half-way through, I couldn't stand to read any more of this pathetic romance novel. And that's what it is: a Harlequin-style romance in the final analysis. It's certainly no adventure novel. It's not a fantasy novel, and it's not even historical fiction. Indeed, and as the author herself kept telegraphing, this isn't historical at all. Quite the opposite - which means it made even less sense.
So what were these roadblocks? Well the first was one which I detest most of all: switch and bait. I know with Big Publishing™ you lose control of important aspects of your work (like book blurbs for instance), but I felt I was promised an adventure with fantasy elements, and a strong main character. Instead, I got this sad little romance in place of adventure. I thought I was getting a strong female character who knew her own mind and was not afraid to go after what she wanted, but instead, I got this wilting violet whose heart goes all a-flutter whenever trope triangle guy #1 (his name is irrelevant) gets close. I am serious. The number of times her skin flushed and her heart hammered was truly nauseating.
This princess isn't a strong female at all. She's weak, selfish, sad, cowardly, dishonest, capricious, thoughtless, and pathetic - and the laughable thing is that even taken as such she still isn't credible. We're given snippets of her history here and there, and I'm sorry but that tomboy history doth not a wilting violet make. On the contrary. Neither does a mature woman, which is what she's presented as (even though she's seventeen years old) fall in love the instant she meets a guy. This was truly one of the most pathetic females I've ever encountered in fiction.
The second major roadblock was a totally unbelievable "love" triangle. This princess runs away to a distant city to avoid her arranged marriage, and starts living life as a waitress, and the prince she was to marry - one whom she had never set eyes upon, chases after her even though he didn't want to marry her either. Why? His motivation is entirely absurd, because he has none. He had no more interest in her than she did in him, so where is his drive to find her? It's nonsense.
It wasn't as if trope guy #1 was anything. He was supposed to be a prince of the land, but he came off as a country bumpkin and not just a country bumpkin, but a really stupid one. How would any self-respecting princess find such a man attractive? Well the author has that covered! He's tall. Yep. that's it. Oh, and he has a broad chest, because you know it's a capital offense for a YA chick to find any guy attractive if he's shorter and doesn't have a broad chest.
The real problem here however, is that we have yet another female author portraying a female main character through whom she advises her young and evidently impressionable female readers that it's okay for a girl to be involved with a guy who does not respect boundaries, who cannot take "No!" for an answer, who stalks the girl, and who enters her home without permission. That's unforgivable, and female authors who write stories like this ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Far from being offended by this behavior, this loser princess doesn't find any of this even so much as creepy, let alone objectionable. She rewards it with a kiss. I don't know: maybe she's so preoccupied by flushing like a public toilet and in coping with more flutters than your typical aviary hosts that she doesn't notice his obnoxious behavior? She is truly one of the limpest, saddest, most worthless female main characters ever.
Trope guy #2 (and he deserves that epithet) is even worse if you can get your mind around that. He's an assassin sent to kill the princess, yet he consistently fails to do so. Again, there is zero motivation for his failure. This novel simply is not credible. The really laughable thing is that this guy, the assassin, has more respect for the princess than the prince does! How hilarious is that?
Add to this the fact that this princess outright lies to her best friend about something critical, and that the only thing she can ever talk about, or even think about, is getting a guy, and this really puts this entire novel in the crapper.
At the risk of a big spoiler, I also didn't get why there were kingdoms, and this absurd 'first daughter' religion, and why the most advanced technology was swords. Given what the author has gone out of her way to telegraphing so loudly, none of this setting made any sense at all, which was yet another roadblock for me. That's all I am going to say about that! In short, this novel is pathetic. I rate it WARTY! It had a lot of potential, if it had been handled right, but it turned out to be the worst one I've read this year so far.
