Book Review: The Kiss of Deception by Mary Pearson

Release Date: July 8, 2014
Publisher: Henry Holt & Co.
Pages: 486
Received: ARC from publisher, via NetGalley
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
Goodreads

I really, really, really didn't like this book. I feel like there have been a million reviews for The Kiss of Deception lately and I'm so bleurgh about the book overall so I'm going for the bullet points.

Here we go, seven reasons I did not like The Kiss of Deception:

1. LOVE TRIANGLE. This one was especially insufferable. Lia gets to choose between an aimlessly moody prince with a bland personality and a wishy washy assassin who isn't assassiny enough to be cool but is way too assissiny for Lia to actually consider as a romantic partner (unless she's lost her mind, which, well, more on that later). Both choices are awful and shouldn't even be on the table for consideration, yet Lia somehow manages to fall for both of them. Can you hear me face-palming?

2. Lia is not very bright. You know how sometimes authors make their characters do unrealistically stupid things in order to advance the plot? Yeah, The Kiss of Deception is kind of the opposite of that. The plot is incredibly unrealistic in order to accommodate Lia's blinding stupidity. So, Lia's decision to run away from home (that would be, her ROYAL home), shirk her duties (which would be entering into a political alliance through marriage) and play barmaid in a tavern a few towns over? Yeah, no one will look for her, or find her!

SPOILER (except her brother, who finds her pretty fast...and lets her stay there because, um, royal responsibility is for suckers so enjoy shlepping drinks and crushing on the locals?)

3. Three quarters of the (very long) book is spent doing absolutely nothing. Also, incredibly uneven plotting. Where was the editor?

4. Total cliffhanger ending. Don't think I can be manipulated into reading book 2 by dangling all those loose ends in my face. I don't care enough about anything in this book to bother reading the next one, cliffhanger or no cliffhanger.

5. Lia destroyed a priceless historical heirloom. As a lover of history, antiques, and all such things I literally gasped when Lia casually discarded this object in a scene that I think was supposed to make her seem "free spirited" but just made her seem childish.

6. The world building was seriously lacking. Sporadic allusions to political disputes (with no substance), impending war (with no legit cause), and the existence of some kind of magic stuff all set in a generic Medieval-ish village does not constitute proper world building. Inserting vague story excerpts randomly throughout the narrative also does not constitute world building. Even if it's written in italics.

7. Look, I'm totally cool with unreliable narrators, but they have to be done right. When done right, they can completely make a book. There's so much wrong with the way it was done in The Kiss of Deception. It was obvious, but less because there were clues and more because it was handled in an awkward, clunky way. Absolutely nothing changed once it was revealed so I don't really see what the point of it was to begin with.

Bottom line

Awful. Disappointing. Almost enough to make me swear off this author if she hadn't also written the fantastic The Adoration of Jenna Fox.