A review by kristid
Ink Exchange by Melissa Marr

4.0

Ink Exchange is the companion novel to Wicked Lovely, which basically means that it is not the sequel to Wicked Lovely, but is still set in the same world and has many of the same characters as Wicked Lovely.

Personally, I like Ink Exchange better than I did Wicked Lovely. To be fair, WL was one of the first fae novels that I’d read, along with the Holly Black series, so I was just getting to know about the glamours and the sight and all that fae lingo.

Ink Exchange is definitely the darker novel of the too, this one is basically about addiction. It revolves around one of Ash’s friends Leslie, Irial, the king of the Dark Court, and Niall, Keenan's adviser.

I love this world that Marr has created where faeries and mortals co-exist. She paints a beautiful world full of mayhem and chaos! And I love that she doesn’t give a happy fairy-tale ending, well the ending that I wanted to see anyway, and yet I find that it was very satisfying.

The characters in this novel are fantastic. You have the Dark Court, which obviously is supposed to be bad, but are they really? Every character is flawed, they have these wonderful qualities and yet they also have these bad qualities. It’s refreshing to be unable to label who’s good and who’s evil.

There was a lot more depth than I was expecting. My first impressions of Leslie from Wicked Lovely were extremely off. She is one of the most complex characters and it was totally unexpected. I really recommend this one for dark fantasy fans.