I’m not sure if any of you remember, but (if my capricious memory serves me right), I promised to blog about Wicked Lovely a long time ago. Sure, I mentioned Melissa Marr and her awesome agent Rachel Vater (remember her?), but I haven’t really blogged about the books themselves.
They take my breath away. I admit, the whole Twilight hype has made me wary of vampires and when I first laid my hands on Wicked Lovely and it’s dark, riveting (I admit I copied those words from Tamora Pierce’s review of the book, since I couldn’t think of any other words to describe it) world of faeries and the brave mortals who interact with them, I was immediately pulled in.
But before you go and decide to read the book, let me warn you it has it’s inappropriate moments and really should be reserved for the older teen. (But you all read Breaking Dawn, so it should be nothing. It isn’t worse than Breaking Dawn in terms of inappropriateness.
But it is darker and more grotesque than some of the YA novels out there. The books are similar to Holly Black’s books (Tithe, Valiant, and Ironside) in the sense that they are about faeries who literally–for the lack of a better word–seduce/prey on/enjoy tormenting humans. Also, Leslie, the main character, is a rape victim (although this is only mentioned a little…I mean, no gross details or anything like that.
You see, according to Holly Black and Melissa Marr (and from the similarities between their writings, I think they both based the whole faerie thing on popular lore), the faeries are divided into Courts, basically little, rival…kingdoms that constantly fight for survival.(Well, actually, I’m not sure/I don’t remember if Black did this…sorry if she didn’t.) All of the Courts have a King or a Queen or both, who have absolute and total rule over their Court.
But from what glimpses of their perspectives I’ve managed to have (courtesy of Black and Marr), being a monarch of unruly/sinful/desperate faeries isn’t always a good thing. Sure, the monarch has complete and total rule over the Court, but they also have to bear the burden of making sure that their Court survives, that it doesn’t get killed off my other Courts or implodes into itself by foolishness and recklessness. I sort of pity them. Almost.
And unlike the pearly white vampires of Stephenie Meyer, these faeries are not always pretty. In fact, I’m sure that if both authors’ books were made into movies…I would be terrified. And unlike Edward, I don’t think any of the faeries (that are my favorite characters) would appeal to me physically. But then again, it’s the inside that counts, isn’t it? 
Oooooo, the inside…just thinking about it makes little fireworks of joy go off on my brain. Melissa Marr’s characters are so richly developed and very round. I love it how in her books, no character is truly evil (well, except for the Winter Queen in Wicked Lovely, she was a big b****). Even though some of the faeries do horrible, horrible things to mortals and to each other, she switches to that particular character’s perspective and allows you to see it from a different slant of light.
For example, in Ink Exchange (spoiler alert), we meet Irial, the king of the Dark Court, whose faeries are supposedly the worst of the worst. All of the other Courts fear his Court, since they feed on (literally feed, it provides a very frustrating problem for Irial later on) fear, lust, pain, and all of the dark emotions. (Hence the name). The Court also shrouds themselves with shadow and some of them even feed on blood, like vampires. (But don’t worry, this is the closest she gets to the cliche world of vampires.) But that’s not really true…in a sense. Sure, Irial sort of does irrational, provoking things sometimes in order to get nourishment from their emotions, in my opinion and perhaps in reality, it isn’t really their fault that the only things that provide nourishment are emotions!
Okay, enough on justifying the Dark Court, moving onto the Irial’s problem. His faeries (and also himself) were literally starving. Why? Well, ever since what happened in WL… (long story short, Keenan ((the Summer King)), with the help of Aislinn ((the brave heroine of that book who later on becomes the Summer Queen)) overcomes his mother, the Winter Queen’s ((talk about irony…who knew summer’s mother was winter?)) oppressing rule, stops a war between the Summer and Winter Courts, and brings peace to the land) everything is just too darn peaceful! No faeries screaming in terror, grappling each other’s throats in anger, etc. No…emotion. Just an uneventful, unhealthy (to the Dark Faeries, anyway) peace.
To make it worse, the Dark Court can only feed on faeries, and not the emotional humans that just have too much emotion for their own good. (Apparently, faeries, being almost immortal ((they can be killed, but they live an almost unlimited amount of time, providing that they have the ideal living conditions–which Irial’s faeries currently didn’t have)), are more…emotionless and more…indifferent than humans ((kind of how the vampires are in Twilight compared to the shallow, easily upset humans)).
And to solve his problem, he comes up with an ingenious idea of an “ink exchange” where basically a human gets tattooed with his blood…((which is weirdly shadowy, and actually sort of ressembles ink))…thus connecting himself to him. And Irial, being connected with the rest of his Court, used that human as a “channel” to supply human emotions to his fey. (For those of you who are taking Biology, think of protein channel…lol.)
But here’s the horrible part. Now, the Dark Court can only feed on horrible, intense, and dark emotions. And to get the human and the people around him to feel these unpleasant emotions…let’s just say there was a lot of bloodshed, death, lust, etc. involved.
Then came along Leslie, the protagonist of IE. She is a victim of rape and abuse, courtesy of her sick, psychotic drug-loving brother. She desperately wants a tattoo, thinking that marking her skin would allow her to take control of her life. (How she came to this ridiculous conclusion, I have no idea.
And she just HAPPENS to choose a tattoo that has Irial’s blood in it. Yes, she becomes the ink exchange for Irial and all the other Dark Court Faeries. One of the things that cracks me up about the tattoo applying scene is that when the tattoo dude (who happens to be half-faerie and therefore sort of working for them, which sucks for Leslie) applies the tattoo onto her back, she hears Irial’s evil laugh. lol.
I’m not going to spoil anymore, but let’s just say that things don’t really go as Irial expected it to go, and Leslie is an awesome character that really pulls through despite her serious problems and goes her own way. (That’s like, what I love the most about Marr’s heroines. They’re not Mary-Sues and they always find a new situation to the problem. So, like, the ending is almost ((well, perhaps even more than that if you’re not good at predicting things)) a surprise.
Wicked Lovely
Ink Exchange
Here’s an interview of Melissa Marr, just in case you’re interested.
A fun little fact: The girl on the cover of Wicked Lovely and Ink Exchange are the same person. Does that mean Aislinn and Leslie are twins? lol jk. It is pretty funny though.
