Reviews

Malice by Heather Walter

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superducky800's review against another edition

1.0

dnf’d at 35%. I might give this another shot later but honestly it was such a huge disappointment and so intolerable that I don’t think I can get through it. When I saw that this was a sapphic retelling of Sleeping Beauty I (like everyone else) had really high hopes for this. Sleeping Beauty is my favorite fairy tale and my favorite Disney movie and also my favorite ballet. And I absolutely love seeing sapphic representation. And for some reason sapphic fairy tale retellings specifically make me really happy. I really wanted to like this. But unfortunately, it was written so poorly. The characters were awful and unconvincing. I wanted to like Alyce but she was just so damn annoying. Homegirl needs some serious therapy. I like Aurora but I’m also painfully aware that she’s written way too conveniently, of course she has no flaws and immediately loves Alyce despite having no reason to…she’s a plot device and was planted there. It’s like the author wanted to make Sleeping Beauty sapphic and just sucked at writing or something. The only thing I liked was Callow and Aurora. But like I said, Aurora had no development, of course I liked her, she wasn’t written to be convincing, she was written to be perfect with no flaws and fit inside some categorical stereotypical box. Also oh my GOD there was SO much info dumping. It was unbearable. Sometimes I was so fed up with it that I skipped entire paragraphs or pages until I got to the parts with actual dialogue. And what’s even crazier is that I didn’t feel like I had missed anything at all. All of that world-building and lore was almost all completely unnecessary information. If you really want to go that in depth into that stuff then write a prequel or write a companion compendium or something. Don’t just force it into the novel, you’d be surprised how little of that stuff the reader actually needs to understand what’s going on in the book. Have some more faith in your readers’ intelligence and ability to figure things out! Half the fun of reading is the mystery and suspense and the putting pieces together as you go. Don’t just hand it out plainly, that’s boring and annoying as hell. Another thing that’s perhaps a little petty but the author didn’t do enough research about plants before including them in the book. Belladonna and foxglove would not give someone a quick swift painless death, it would torment them for hours until they were so broken that they physically could not continue living and their body literally shuts down. And valerian isn’t a poison… so I don’t know why that was part of a poisonous elixir… And one more thing, this book is marketed as an adult book but it reads like YA. And not good YA. like really really crappy and unbearable YA where it’s both overly simple and too over the top at the same time.

TLDR just go read Girls Made of Snow and Glass. It’s a sapphic Snow White retelling and it’s INFINITELY better than this book.