Malice

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I had gone into this book knowing almost nothing about it, other than that everyone was highly praising it. Malice is a darker retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale. You like a revenge fantasy? Here you go. You'll enjoy reading as Alice gets to dish out what everyone else deserves in this book.

The lead character, Alice, is half-Vila, which is basically a dark Fae. Her power can only really be used for evil things — making people ugly, making them forget how to dance, killing, poisoning, etc. All her life she's been made to feel outcast and unwanted. She's been made to serve the nobility of the kingdom, making them tinctures and elixirs that they use on each other. The House in which she works is home to Graces — think the faeries from Sleeping Beauty, only mostly human. They have powers like control over beauty, wisdom, music, etc. The majority of these Graces are awful to Alice. Cruel, and mean and just plain malicious. Alice lives a terrible life in mostly solitude, in a crappy cold room surrounded by people who hate her and let her know it.

Then she meets Aurora, and everything changes.

I'm not going to spoil this, because it's just so much more enjoyable to read. But I'll tell you just this — this book is gay, gay, gay. The ending of this book was SO satisfying.

I thoroughly enjoyed Malice, and I'm eager to dive into my ARC of Misrule, the next book in this duology.