Author: Melissa Marr
Publisher: Recorded books
Rating: WARTY!
Read by Nick Landrum on Recorded books, and I was not impressed by his voice. He just seemed wrong for this story.
This novel is a literal fairy tale, and I've had mixed experiences with these. The more they cling to trope - for example in using obscure Gaelic names and larding them up with Celtic or pseudo-Celtic folklore - the more I tend to dislike them. This one is the second in a series (which wasn't clear to me when I picked it up on close-out at a bookstore), but it's not a simple sequel to the first! It's implied that it can be read as a stand-alone, but it really can't because it's so dependent upon what went before that it's not really independent. The fact is that it really is a sequel: even though it focuses on other characters, there is still a host of hold-overs from the first volume popping-up here.
One of these is Aislinn, but her name is pronounced Ashlynn, except that Landrum reads it as Ashling (at least that's how it sounds to me when he says it). If this novel was set in Ireland, or if it were set a thousand years ago, I could see that working, but what are the odds of your common-or-garden American family not only naming their child Ashlynn, but also both spelling and pronouncing it the Gaelic way? Yes, it could happen, but is it likely? No. That struck a really false note for me.
As if this isn't enough annoyance, there's an all-but-literal parade of characters who pop up, one after another, quickly disappear, and then pop up again later after you've forgotten them. It's as irritating as it is confusing trying to try to remember who is whom. Maybe if you've read the previous volume it would be easier. In addition to that, we have a character called Gabriel, but Gabriel isn't his name, it's his title! And we have hounds, who are not actually hounds - they're faeries. Or is it fae? Because people who write these novels are typically (and hilariously) far too embarrassed by their chosen genre to actually call them what they are: fairies. They somehow think we'll take this more seriously if we adopt the rather biblical directive to take an 'e' for an 'i'.
That said, this novel started out not too badly. It was only after we were properly introduced to the main character, Lesley, that it started to go downhill. Lesley lives in god-awful circumstances. Her mother left the home and never came back. Her father is an alcoholic, and her brother a drug addict who once drugged Lesley and offered her body to his friends in payment for something or other. Yes, she was raped, but she seems to be 'all better' now. I say it like that, because this horrible event seems to have had little impact upon her, despite her repeatedly referencing it.
Now I'm no female, although I play one on TV (I'm kidding!), and fortunately for me, I've never been raped, so I honestly cannot (nor would I want to) pretend to know how this might feel; however, I have had times when I've been scared and made to feel badly uncomfortable, so I do have an indirect insight into this sort of emotion. Everyone is going to react differently to an experience like this, and one person will take a longer or shorter time to get to grips with it in whatever way works for them than will another.
If Lesley truly is as 'over it' (as she's portrayed here), then more power to her, but for me, her free-and-easy approach to everything, and in particular to being around strange guys just struck me as being a little bit too free-and-easy to lend her back-story much verisimilitude. It seemed unrealistic to me, and that's all I'm going to say on this topic. Hopefully others (who know more about what they're talking about here than I do!) will weigh in on this and give us a better and more rounded picture.
The thing which really seemed absurd to me about her, is her obsession with getting a tattoo, as though it would magically change her life. Yes, in this context, it does quite literally and magically change her life, but she can't have known that a priori. She wants to get away from her home and take charge of her life, which is great, but she already has a plan: to go to college, and in the near future, too. That's smart and commendable, but given that, my problem is: why then does she still feel that she needs something more? And if she does, why is it that she feels a tattoo will fix everything?
What bothered me is that we're offered no justification for this attitude. It's like she has the mentality of a thirteen-year-old or something, not a woman on the cusp of adulthood which, given her experiences and her life so far, she's been long qualified for. This just struck a false note: what, the author couldn't think of a better way to get her tattooed? This is of course, a must if the story is going anywhere, but this clunky set-up was bad and made me lose respect for the main character, which is never a good game for an author to bring to a story.
But even if I accept all of this and find nothing to criticize in it, I'm still not over the worst problem with this novel which is that it is absolutely and unquestionably boring. We get page after page - chapter after chapter - of nothing happening. Hum-drum, meaningless, boring conversation going nowhere. Non-events. Fairy meetings and plans which never go anywhere. "Bad fairy" Iriel - or whatever spelling - (who should have been named 'Irritate') ridiculously salivating over his human. It's tedious in the extreme. There is no story here.
I don't get this supernatural obsession with humans which is the hallmark of every story of this nature, and it doesn't matter if the story is about werewolves, or demons, or vampires, or fairies: every last one of 'em is obsessed with jumping humans' bones. Why is that? I don't frequent these genres, but in the ones I've read, I've ever encountered one that I recall which justifies this obsession in any way. It's just accepted. Yet these are, for example with vampires, the sleekest, sexiest, fastest, strongest, most beautiful beings there are, and they obsess over taking a human to bed (or just taking them, period)? It makes no sense. That would be like us obsessing over jumping some chimpanzee's bones. Yeah, maybe there are some people like that, but it's sure not the norm, much less an obsession. It's the same with angels. I mean what could be more angelic than an angel, and yet these creatures obsess over flawed, homely humans? It makes zero sense.
Marr does offer some justification, but it's for the wrong thing. These fairies feed on humans in some ethereal way, but this still fails to account for a fairy falling in love with one of us. I mean you can love your pet, but unless you're seriously depraved, you don't actually want to marry it and have sex. The story I would like to read is the one which accounts for these things and makes that account believable. Instead what we get are tired and tedious trope tales from YA writers about supernaturally beautiful and powerful men making young girls do their bidding.
I honestly have to ask why they're lining up to write these sick stories. More than this, though, I'd like to know what's going through the mind of a girl who buys these stories. Does she really want to be overpowered by a man who will compel her to do his will? I seriously hope not. So more than what it tells us about the authors, what does it say about the state of mind of the readership? And in the light of Lesley's experience in this novel, what message does this carry to boys - who for the most part, don't avidly read this kind of novel, but who can't be blind to the fact that girls swallow them voraciously. Are these boys getting a message that if they look appealing enough and say the right words, they can overpower a girl and bend her to their will? Shame on such authorship.
This novel is trash, period.
