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| Wicked Lovely | 
 enlarge | Author: Melissa Marr
Publisher: HarperTeen
Category: Book
List Price: $16.99
Buy New: $10.93
You Save: $6.06 (36%)
New (5) Used (9) from $8.34
Avg. Customer Rating:  118 reviews
Sales Rank: 184483
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Hardcover
Reading Level: Young Adult
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.3
ASIN: B0018SYYXW
Publication Date: June 1, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new! Beautiful! May have a small remainder mark (ink mark) along the edge. gift quality, crisp, clean, multiple copies available, prompt shipping, excellent service.
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Product Description
Rule #3: Don't stare at invisible faeries. Aislinn has always seen faeries. Powerful and dangerous, they walk hidden in mortal world. Aislinn fears their cruelty—especially if they learn of her Sight—and wishes she were as blind to their presence as other teens. Rule #2: Don't speak to invisible faeries. Now faeries are stalking her. One of them, Keenan, who is equal parts terrifying and alluring, is trying to talk to her, asking questions Aislinn is afraid to answer. Rule #1: Don't ever attract their attention. But it's too late. Keenan is the Summer King who has sought his queen for nine centuries. Without her, summer itself will perish. He is determined that Aislinn will become the Summer Queen at any cost—regardless of her plans or desires. Suddenly none of the rules that have kept Aislinn safe are working anymore, and everything is on the line: her freedom; her best friend, Seth; her life; everything. Faerie intrigue, mortal love, and the clash of ancient rules and modern expectations swirl together in Melissa Marr's stunning 21st century faery tale.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 113 more reviews...
 I see fairies July 11, 2007
60 out of 95 found this review helpful
I mean fairies and plenty of steamy sex. What's so dull about that? Yet "Wicked Lovely" failed to enchant me. The characters are flat and stereotypical. The heroine Aislinn likes to play pool and has a desperate crush on a guy named Seth. She is in conflict because she can see the aforementioned fairies, yet doesn't want to fulfill her destiny by becoming the Summer Queen. She wants to go to college (and make out with mortals). Yet the author provides almost no detail about Aislinn. We don't get a good idea of what she looks like, what "typical teen" stuff apart from sex and pool she enjoys, or her future plans, even though at one point she's vehement that she gets to go to college. The relationship with her grandmother is rushed which makes it diffiuclt to understand why they behave as they do. The fairies are all two-dimensional types, too. You can't love or hate the characters because of this, and it's hard to care how she will resolve her problems. I got the impression the author really wanted to write a bodice ripper instead of a young adult fantasy.
 Courtesy of Teens Read Too June 12, 2007
56 out of 68 found this review helpful
Aislinn has always followed the rules. Her Grandmother has drilled them into her since she was a young child. Don't stare at invisible faeries. Don't speak to invisible faeries. Don't ever attract the faeries' attention. Aislinn has developed the skill to ignore them. She walks past them without flinching, even when the faeries are pinching or touching others around her like they love to do.
Faeries come in many shapes and sizes and Aislinn has seen them all. She's seen them in the glamours they wear in order to pass as humans and can pick one out of a crowd even when they are trying to blend in. Aislinn has never been surprised by what she has seen them do - that is, until they start breaking the rules.
Faeries don't like steel. It causes them pain and weakens them. Because of that, Aislinn's "safe" place has always been Seth's house. Seth is a long-time friend who happens to live in a converted steel train car. Aislinn always knew that if she could make it there she'd have peace, because the faeries could never follow her into the train yard. But, something has changed. They are creeping closer and closer and paying more attention to her. They are even gathering outside Seth's place.
Aislinn really begins to worry when two faeries, Keenan and Donia, approach her and speak directly to her. She gets away from them as quickly as possible, now hyper-aware of the growing number of faeries surrounding and following her. She hears them say things like, "Do you think she's the one?" Aislinn realizes that in order to figure out what they want from her she is going to have to break the rules she's grown up with all of her life.
Keenan is the Summer King. His mother, the Winter Queen, has limited his powers and is slowly taking over the elements. Days are colder and eventually everything will be covered in ice, unless Keenan finds the girl who is meant to be his Summer Queen. Together they would have the power to overcome the Winter Queen's chill. Keenan thinks Aislinn is the one and she is in danger because of it. The Winter Queen will do everything she can to prevent her son from getting the power he needs to overthrow her. Another problem, of course, is that Aislinn doesn't want to be Summer Queen. She has avoided faeries all of her life and she sure doesn't want to become one now. Especially when her feelings for Seth have developed into more than friendship - and becoming the Summer Queen would mean spending an eternity with Keenan.
Melissa Marr has written a wonderfully inventive story that incorporates actual quotes from books written on the subject of faeries dating back to the 1800's. Her ability to keep a complicated story with several important characters clear to the reader is phenomenal. The relationship she creates between Aislinn and Seth is heartwarming, leading the reader to fall in love right along with them. If you aren't usually a fan of faerie stories, you might want to give this one a try. The blending of the realistic world and the world of the fey is masterfully done. You'll almost believe faeries are all around you.
Reviewed by: Karin Perry
 Wicked awful! October 23, 2007
51 out of 75 found this review helpful
I've had awful luck with fantasy fiction this summer. I actually started reading this book back in August, but only just picked it back up and finished it today (I didn't really want to, but I try not to review anything on Amazon unless I've read it, listened to it, or watched it in its entirety).
So why did I put it down? Because it was horrible! Melissa Marr gives herself away as an unripe and unready first-time author, nearly from the beginning of the book. I would almost expect to look at the copyright information and find that this was a self-published work; I can't figure out how it got into a regular publishing house.
For whatever reason, the writing was not easy to read (and maybe that's why it took me so long to finish). I didn't care at all about the cardboard characters. Besides that, I felt cheated. I read the jacket blurb and first page in the bookstore, and liked the first part of what I thought would be a regular fairy fantasy book. It was only after I got home and turned the page that I found myself in a world of dingy pool halls, tattoo parlours, bloody and violent fairies, and boring characters.
It became obvious as I read that Marr was just putting her own fantasies to paper. This is not necessarily a bad thing for an author to do... as long as those fantasies are interesting! The only character that I found at all intriguing (Seth) seemed to be just a wish-fulfillment fantasy. He's covered in hardware (Marr must like piercings), he reads a lot (Marr must like intellectual guys), and he regularly gets tested for STDs (Marr... is living on another planet. Was the fact that he's sleeping with a bunch of disease-ridden women supposed to be romantic? I actually laughed when I read that part. I could have done without that bit of information). Despite the fact that we're told that Seth is hot, we're never shown it. We don't even know what he looks like, except that he has black hair. But, by far, the most annoying thing for me about Seth was that the story was never told from his point of view. We've got Aislinn's, Keenan's, Donia's, and Beira's points of view... but not Seth's?
Which brings me to another complaint I had with this book. For goodness sake, pick a point of view and stick with it! There was virtually no way to tell when a shift had occurred (other than a blank line or a little typographical ornament), and if I happened to put down the book and come back later, I had a hard time figuring out whose eyes I was supposed to be seeing through. Added to that was Marr's annoyingly bad writing. Paragraph breaks were thrown in at weird moments for seemingly no reason at all. Then there'd be some un-attributed speech (you couldn't figure out who was talking, and the errant paragraph breaks were no help). At times, I almost wondered if certain spots had originally been intended as chapter breaks, but then were messily discarded at the last minute. And, on top of everything else, there were times in the book when the characters, in discussion, would say something that seemed to make no sense in the context of the conversation!
Characterization was the poorest I've seen in a long time. For the main characters, we've got: the bland and beautiful heroine; her slightly more interesting and also beautiful mortal love interest; her boring and beautiful adversary; the adversary's dull and beautiful love interest; and the evil but beautiful villainess. Secondary characters weren't much better. Aislinn's slutty Catholic schoolgirl friends and their bad-boy boyfriends (enough stereotypes for you?) were pointless. What did one of the guys being a "lousy lay" have to do with anything? And the annoyingly overprotective grandmother was just icing on the reader-frustration cake.
Speaking of Aislinn's family, how on earth did she not know what happened to her mother? Marr let that foreshadowing drop early on in the book with about as much subtlety as an elephant stampeding a dinner party. So, not only is Aislinn boring, beautiful, and stereotypical... she's also really, really stupid.
Oh Please make it stop!!! August 15, 2007
29 out of 43 found this review helpful
I can't even believe a publishing house picked this book up. As I am sure you read above, this book is about a girl who has the gift of Fairy sight and the king wants to make her his queen. O.k, I can work with this....if it was any good. Unfortunately the most compelling part of the reading experience is the expectation you get from reading the inside flap. Once you begin the book you are stuck with flat, lifeless characters that are completely interchangeable with one another because there is nothing that stands out about them. A boring, repetitive story that continually makes you bare witness to characters saying the same thing over and over again while they have cheesy, one dimensional and predictable conversations with each other. It is so painful I would have expected to write something like this when I was in middle school. I believe the author must have grown up reading "Forbidden Game" and Vampire Diaries" because there are some elements that feel ripped off but not in a good nostalgic way. Don't waste your money on this steamer, it was a good concept that was poorly executed with cliche plot devices and stereotypical character reactions. If you like this type of story then I suggest you read the "Twilight series", "Poison", "Moon Called" and "Blood and Chocolat" you can also check out Vampire Diaries and Forbidden Game as I mentioned above.
Wickedly Disappointing July 28, 2007
21 out of 32 found this review helpful
I've always hated being let down by a book.
It's even worse when the book looks really good, but that appearance quickly melts away as you wind deeper and deeper into the story, and by the end, you want to incinerate every last copy that you see. Wicked Lovely did just that for me.
After waiting forever to finally buy this title, I cracked it open with mounting anticipation. It had been endorsed by several other people, and most every review I read was excellent. From what I read on the inside flap, this story idea was genius--it seemed that it would be deliciously original, and would hold a promising, riveting storyline. Oh, how wrong I was! Not far at all into the story, I was immensely unimpressed by the author's choice of words--totally bland, and begging to have the several swear words that it had inserted. Sure, words like that are necessary lots of the time, but what sort of an awesome story about faeries has the f-word twice? I usually don't have a TON of trouble with a little profanity, but reading it in this book completely made me lose the feel of delicious prose it had seemed to promise. Also, the tone and point of view that the author took on was almost completely focused on sexual things. Sex is brought up so many times, and to me, it seemed completely unnecessary to the storyline. It seemed that it was solely added as a "shock factor", and overall, made me just a little uncomfortable to read these unnecessary scenes.
My biggest problem with this book was the characters. They were absolutely more bland than the word choice chosen to depict them. (But then again, they weren't even depicted that well!) I don't think I've ever, in my entire lifetime, picked up a book with such flat, predictable characters. At points, I wanted so badly to be able to like them (especially Donia), but the author made it almost impossible. Aislinn, the main character, was frustratingly stubborn, and so unrealistic, I was tempted to just abandon the book. Seth was Mr. Unrealistic as well--always thinking of the best for Aislinn, never faltering, and just to perfect personality-wise to be believable. And, for all of the other characters, I just felt like a distant viewer--it was near impossible to be able to feel for them, to get inside of them. I really, honestly, didn't care about any of them by the end.
I wanted so badly to like this book, but several things just couldn't make it possible. Though it was a brilliant idea to begin with, put in the hands of a more masterful wordsmith, I think it would have done better. Overall, when I finished this book, all it did was leave a nasty taste in my mouth--it was wickedly disappointing.
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