Heather Walter - Malice

What can I say? I was tired of all the literary fibre on my reading list. I needed some froth, some fluff, some empty calories. I know that romance doesn't do it for me though - my fluff of choice is either fantasy or mystery - so I riffled through the bin of rescued free books and came up with Malice.

Malice is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty, but very loosely - it's told from the wicked witch's POV and well before the events of the fairy tale. It's largely a villain origin story: Alyce, the Dark Grace, is a misfit in the vain and superficial kingdom of Briar. 

Briar itself has a complex political history which I won't go into detail here. The upshot is that the humans of Briar get Graces, which are humans with limited fairy magic in their blood. These Graces - the antecedents of fairy godmothers I guess? - make potions with their magical golden blood, until their blood turns back to red, meaning all their magic has run out. Apart from fancy blood the Graces also have bright candy-coloured hair while still magical - the colour fades when they stop being magical - making them human My Little Ponies.

I quite liked the world-building in this book. Although Malice doesn't explore the parts which I find interesting, like the wisdom Graces (my favourite character was Laurel the wisdom Grace) and pleasure Graces (I mean the smut just writes itself!).

There's a sapphic romance between Alyce and Aurora (the princess who's cursed to sleep in Sleeping Beauty, remember). I'm not into it. It's just love at first sight and some "you can't possibly like me, I'm ugly and evil"-type angst. Eh. The characters could have gone on adventures and trials together and gotten closer, but they didn't. I thought even Alyce and Laurel had more chemistry.

The pace of the book is weird. In the first 85% of the book a lot of stuff happens but it doesn't seem to build up into what happens in the last 15% - i.e. Alyce "goes bad". (Although not really - she just gets possessed by an evil ancestor.) 

By then I was speed-reading to finish the book because I had lost interest. The writing is just too bad even for my tastes - all those awful teen emo lyrics like "a scream wrenched itself free from my throat" and "my heart fluttered like a caged bird in my chest" and "I drank her words like honey". When I went back to Sense & Sensibility again afterwards - what a difference!

Well, I wasn't satisfied with this break from the classics so I think I'm going to read some more fantasy/sci-fi books.