Bumpy Oak Books

2 stars

**I was provided an electronic ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for honest review.**

Rin Chupeco’s most recent release, Wicked As You Wish, follows Tala, a member of the cursed Makiling line who can negate the effects of magic. Tala’s story takes place in a world where fairy tale places exist in conjunction with actual places, though things have changed due to their inclusion. The United States are now the Royal States, for example. Neverland, Avalon, and Wonderland all come up along the way. Tala and the descendants of the elite guard called Bandersnatches must see their future king home safely. The Snow Queen and her henchfolk try to prevent that and steal the future king’s firebird. Does it seem like a lot? It’s a lot.

The concept for this book was something I was so very excited about. I love the idea of incorporating fairytale places with the actual world and moving forward from there. I love bloodline associated magic and magical objects. There was POC representation and queer rep and trans rep. All great things. But that was pretty much where my fondness ended was at the concept level.

The first third of the book was a lot of unnatural and inorganic info-dumping in an attempt at world-building. Good info to have about the world for sure. But there were so many topics covered so quickly that it was off-putting. Some things were barely touched on, and might have been more important to know. Other things were heavily discussed and wound up unimportant. I can wade through an info dump with the best of them, but woo buddy were we in deep. I even would have been okay with it had everything been relevant, but not everything was and I honestly still don’t know how the magic system completely works. I know there are glyphs and patents and enchanted objects and the law of equivalent exchange. But those things do not, alone, a cohesive magic system make.

I can overlook a lot of errors if I’m invested in characters. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a ton of time devoted to character-building early on. Most of the character-building work was happening when other things were going wrong. Which also would have been fine and natural if I had enough information to care about them to begin with, but I didn’t.

I honestly would have DNFed this book if it had not been a review copy and had not been from a “big name” author who I had heard a lot of good things about. This may be evidence that Rin Chupeco’s writing style just isn’t for me, as I have previously read The Bone Witch and found it just okay (which I may have mistakenly blamed on the audiobook at the time).

I recognize this may be just me and the author not meshing, and have bumped up my star rating to reflect the redeeming qualities of the book since other folks may not have the issues I did.