‘All teenagers have prob­lems, but few of them can match those of Ais­linn, who has the power to see faeries. Quite under­stand­ably, she wishes that she could share her friends’ obliv­i­ous­ness and tries hard to avoid these invis­i­ble intrud­ers. But one faery in par­tic­u­lar refuses to leave her alone. Keenan the Sum­mer King is con­vinced beyond all rea­son­ing that Ais­linn is the queen he has been seek­ing for nine cen­turies. What’s a 21st-century girl to do when she’s stalked by a suitor nobody else can see?’

I wanted to like this book — the cover is stun­ning, and I liked that in a genre over­flow­ing with vam­pire books, Wicked Lovely went a dif­fer­ent way, but in the end I didn’t enjoy this one much. I know it’s a pop­u­lar book and I can see why, but really, mostly Wicked Lovely just frus­trated me.

Keenan, is the Sum­mer King of the fey, weak­ened by a curse his mother, the Win­ter Queen, has placed on him. She is also respon­si­ble for killing his father, the pre­vi­ous Sum­mer King. For cen­turies Keenan has searched for his Queen, but first she must pass a test. If she passes she will rule beside him, if not, she will be cursed to for­ever warn oth­ers against tak­ing the test, until the next girl fails and takes her place. 

I ended up with many ques­tions regard­ing the fey. Why did the Win­ter Queen and Sum­mer King have a child together? Is that tra­di­tion? If so, why is Keenan search­ing for a Sum­mer Queen and not a Win­ter one? Why kill the Sum­mer King and then curse her son? It’s all very vague and we never get a solid idea of what dri­ves Beira (the Win­ter Queen) and why she does what she does.

The main issue I had with Wicked Lovely was that Ais­linn (Ash) and all the pre­vi­ous girls over the cen­turies, have no choice over what hap­pens to them. Once Keenan has cho­sen them, they begin to loose their mor­tal­ity and have no resis­tance against his faery powers. Even if they decide not to take the test, they still become faeries them­selves, for­ever bound to the sum­mer court and Keenan. These girls are very much just pawns while Keenan and his guards what­ever they wish and that really didn’t sit well with me. When Ash attempts to refuse Keenan’s advances, they actu­ally have sev­eral con­ver­sa­tions as to whether they should just force her to do as she is told, cer­tain that she will ‘fall in line, like the rest of them’ even­tu­ally. This would be a fas­ci­nat­ing por­trayal of the fey, how they rule, how women are viewed in their soci­ety, if I could be sure that we are meant to dis­like them. Too often, Marr seems to be try­ing to con­vince the reader that Keenan is a good guy — though his actions speak oth­er­wise. Keenan is the self-pitying, tor­tured soul we have seen a lot of in YA para­nor­mal fic­tion recently — usu­ally as the ‘hero’. I actu­ally think that this stereo­type works per­fectly for the Sum­mer King of the fey. He is spoilt, vain and sex­ist. He claims he feels guilt, yet this never stops him from prey­ing on the next young woman who catches his eye. Just don’t ask me to hope that Ash ends up with this guy.

Worse than the fey, though, were Ash’s human friends. Ash makes it per­fectly clear that she does not like Keenan. He makes her uncom­fort­able (due to the whole stalk­ing thing) and she wants noth­ing to do with him. Rather then stick up for her and tell the creep to get lost, her ‘friends’ dis­miss her feel­ings out­right, laugh­ingly tell him to ignore what­ever comes out of her silly lit­tle brain — say it’s prob­a­bly just PMS (!!!??!) and pro­ceed to plot with Keenan behind Ash’s back, forc­ing her into a cor­ner until she agrees to go out with him. Who needs ene­mies eh? I actu­ally wanted to throt­tle them.

I have heard peo­ple describe Ash as a strong, inde­pen­dent hero­ine. I would agree with this though at times she can be pretty pas­sive (for exam­ple the way she lets her friends treat her), I can’t say I ever felt con­nected to her char­ac­ter, but she does fight Keenan’s more and more force­ful advances and stands up for her­self. She calls a lot of the shots in the end and the devil inside me is amused when I think of her boss­ing Keenan around for eter­nity then going off to do what­ever the hell she wants — the guy cer­tainly deserves it. Most impor­tantly, I was impressed Marr didn’t go down the typ­i­cal route of the girl falling for the super­nat­ural guy just because he is ‘hot’. I’m extremely glad that Marr has her female pro­tag­o­nist fight for her free­dom and recog­nise and value when some­one treated her with respect and equal­ity - that is def­i­nitely some­thing we need to see more of in YA literature.

The one char­ac­ter I really liked was Donia, she was the most com­plex of them all – and I rather wish Marr had focused on her story instead. Falling in love with Keenan decades before, fail­ing the test and so for­ever cursed to warn off other mor­tal girls from lov­ing Keenan – this is a story I want to read. Her dis­dain and hatred towards Keenan felt real­is­tic (and I loved her for it) but I was sad­dened by the way her story was con­cluded. I felt she should have been, and could have been, a far stronger char­ac­ter than that (though I shan’t say any more for fear of spoilers).

Seth was a nice guy, though a tad unre­al­is­tic at times — he doesn’t bat an eye­lid when Ash tells him she sees faeries — but more impor­tantly, he is very sup­port­ive of Ash. He researches faery lore, and does all he can to help her and be there for her, he trusts that she can han­dle her­self, and gives her space when she needs it. They share a mature, equal, sex­ual rela­tion­ship, (rarely seen in YA) and though he cer­tainly doesn’t like the idea that Keenan is after her, he never once gets pos­ses­sive and bans her from going any­where with­out him. He trusts her. And though I can’t say that I ever really felt a spark between any of the char­ac­ters, I’m glad that for once we get to read about a decent guy, who treats the hero­ine well and she appre­ci­ates this. Overall, I would have to applaud Marr for these qual­i­ties; unfor­tu­nately, I felt these impor­tant mes­sages were mostly lost due to the sym­pa­thy Keenan gen­er­ates. The women in this book still care for him, and help him despite his char­ac­ter, despite every­thing he has done to them. He is too eas­ily for­given. There was the begin­nings of a redemp­tion arc towards the end of the book, though it wasn’t quite enough for me, but per­haps this is some­thing that is explored fur­ther in the later books.

I think I would have enjoyed this story more if it was made clear that the faeries are self­ish, dan­ger­ous, oppres­sive, super­nat­ural beings with sex­ist, anti­quated ideals. My prob­lem is that I couldn’t help feel­ing that Marr kept try­ing to per­suade us to like Keenan in spite of all this. I’m still not sure if we were meant to root for him or not. Wicked Lovely cer­tainly stands out from the crowd, in a genre where the love tri­an­gle is to often pre­dictable and the mys­te­ri­ous, emo, super­nat­ural guy always gets the girl, this made a refresh­ing change, and I enjoyed the fact that there were no vam­pires in sight. I just wish that Marr had focused less on the romance and more on the fey. We don’t go into much detail about their world which is a shame. Despite its qual­i­ties, in the end, there sim­ply wasn’t enough of a plot here to hold my inter­est and I couldn’t con­nect to the char­ac­ters, they felt under-developed to me. For a book that high­lighted a lot of sex­ism in dif­fer­ent forms, a more force­ful fem­i­nist voice was needed. Sadly, Ash, for me, wasn’t a strong enough char­ac­ter to voice that opposition.

Rec­om­mended Read­ing Age: 16+

Rat­ing: 6/10

Not for me, but there are oth­ers who love this book — why not check out some of their reviews:

Bewitched Book­worms

Goodreads

Teen Book Review