Book Review: Ink Exchange

• Ink Exchange •
by Melissa Marr

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Much like its predecessor, Ink Exchange is all sensation and no substance.  Rather than using the book to improve upon the world of fey, Marr lets her impatience with topics already covered in Wicked Lovely rob Ink Exchange of any sort of depth, and the story becomes a flashily sensuous joyride that never dips beneath the surface.

Marr’s second book is a weaker carbon copy of her first, as if she’d merely traced over the lines of Wicked Lovely and inserted less compelling characters. Once again, a human girl is tempted by the king of a fey court who believes that she is destined to belong to him. Once again, she must find the strength to overcome his conviction and his deceptions in order to save herself. However, where Aislinn had a long-standing dislike of the fey and knew how to fight back, Leslie is little more than a “broken toy,” as the Dark King deemed her in the first chapter. Marr tried to give us a heroine who had seen and survived living hell, but Leslie falls far short of the task, and does little more in the end than give others permission to save her.

Unlike Aislinn, whose Sight enabled her to see the invisible world of fey, Leslie is a victim of her own life and others’. Stuck with an alcoholic father and abusive brother, Leslie finds refuge in her friends and in the tattoo she chooses from Rabbit’s shop. Unfortunately, Rabbit is fey, and Leslie’s tattoo turns her into a siphon for emotions, which the Dark King uses to sustain his followers.

Without Wicked Lovely to bolster it, Ink Exchange has no history and even less complexity. The world of fey, so haphazardly described in Wicked Lovely, is even more scattered this time around. And, since we’ve already seen Seth struggling to accept the supernatural, Leslie’s reaction is an even briefer recap of his denial: little more than an impatient pause on Marr’s way to bigger and more dramatic things.

Throughout Ink Exchange, suspense is nonexistent. By the time Leslie’s life begins to change, we’re well aware of what’s really going on. Marr has little interest in hiding the puppets’ strings, as we’re given full access to all of the characters, human and fey alike. There are no surprises because there are no motives that aren’t described by the individual harboring them. At every step, we know what drives the Dark King, what haunts Leslie, and what choices those who love them have to make. Like Wicked Lovely, Ink Exchange is more a melodrama about free will than a fantasy. Once again, human strength is pitted against the depravity of the supernatural, with expected outcomes on both sides.

Emotions run high throughout Ink Exchange, some well beyond the point of plausibility and into absurdity. A tense staring match between the Dark King and the Summer Queen is a melee of flame and shadow, which is enticing at first but quickly grows tiring as none of the fey can seem to have a conversation without setting something ablaze. Most of it runs past –- and through –- the heroine, who spends at least a third of the book as a magic addict and couldn’t be any less interested in heroics. Somewhere near the midpoint, Leslie’s usefulness disappears entirely, leaving others to bicker amongst themselves and coax the plot into action again.

Unlike Wicked Lovely, Marr’s second book has no clear goal and ends up being a showcase for uncontrollable and nearly poisonous emotions. The humans learn to believe in themselves, the fey learn responsibility and mercy, and attraction flows in every direction. A vaguely guilty read without the follow-through, Ink Exchange takes the first book’s strong points and inverts them, leaving us with a few hundred pages of angst but very little worth remembering.

 

Excerpt (p. 23):

Mine. The thought, the need, the reaction were overpowering. Her stomach clenched. She pulled her gaze away, and then forced herself to keep looking. She looked at the other tattoos, but her attention returned to that image as if compelled by it. That one’s mine. For a moment, some trick of light made it look as if one of the eyes in the image winked. She ran her finger over the page, feeling the slick-smooth plastic sheet covering it, imagining the feel of those wings wrapped around her — somehow jagged and velvety all at once. She looked up at Rabbit. “This one. I need this one.”

Rating: C-

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~ by AyDee on August 21, 2008.