Of Swords and Parasols

This sequel to Wicked Lovely, is not about Ash, the heroine of that book, but about her friend, Leslie. Leslie’s mother has disappeared, her father is never around and only sometimes remembers to pay the bills, and her brother is a drug addict who has used his sister as currency when he didn’t have money. In the past, Leslie’s response to this has apparently been to respond in increasingly sexual ways, though she seems to have largely recovered from that particular need by the start of the book.

When she decides to get a tattoo, she chooses a tattoo of eyes and wings, not realizing that they’re the eyes of Irial, the king of the fae’s Dark Court, and designed to call to someone with enough pain and despair to sustain him and allow him to feed his people humanity’s pain and despair through her. Irial, of course, finds himself drawn to Leslie as more than prey. There’s also Niall, the friend of Keenan, the king of the Summer Court, to whom Leslie is mutually attracted, and who has a history of his own with Irial.

Like with Wicked Lovely, I’m largely drawn to Marr’s take on the fae and the application of the darker, old world fae and tradition to modern times. I prefer Ash’s story to Leslie’s, but find Leslie more interesting as a character. I also like how Marr presents these beautiful, immortal men as a temptation to teenaged girls, but portrays the interest of these men in young girls as creepy and wrong. Between Keenan, Irial and Niall, Niall is the only one whose affections come even close to being healthy, but they’re still portrayed as wrong for Leslie.

The rape themes that were brushed aside in Wicked Lovely are treated more seriously in Ink Exchange. In many ways, I feel they (deliberately?) mirror relations between fae and mortals in fables and ballads. I mean, think about it. You have all these stories where a mortal drinks enchanted wine, or is entranced by the fae’s beauty or song, or is irresistibly drawn into the fae world, and becomes (or almost becomes) the lover of a fae. But really, you don’t have any sort of real, meaningful consent there, despite how these tales are typically spun. In Marr’s world, the fae still have far more power than the humans they draw into their world, but this power is portrayed as a very bad, dark thing.