Thank you NetGalley and Redhook Books for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This is somewhere between 3 and 4 starts for me. There was a lot of action and a pretty quick pace in the second half of the book which I liked and it kept me interested. It did take a little bit to get going and hold my attention but that has been pretty much everything right now so I won't hold it against this book. The characters weren't super likeable and felt a little flat/one dimensional to me. Maybe this is because, again, I just got done reading a 500 first-of-series fantasy book and this is a stand-alone. I think the other thing that I didn't care for was that the magic system wasn't really explained or didn't really seem to have specific rules (again, used to super detailed fantasy series over here). And maybe that was on purpose and it might work for other folks but I wanted a better magic foundation. ( )

I quite liked this one, 3.5 rounded up to 4 stars because lesbians, that's why.

A bit 1920s Practical Magic (the movie), a little post-novel Oliver Twist 'what if?', Wild and Wicked Things also keeps the viciousness of a fairytale underneath the words.

My one quibble is that there's no way Annie wouldn't have had at least some sporadic Yorkshire-isms in her language. Actually, the language was, in my view a little too modern, a little too clean of regionalisms and I think that got in the way of creating a fully-realized world. ( )

Nothing terribly new. I struggled to get through this one a little, I was so glad I was done…. I spent more than half the book waiting impatiently for the characters to get a clue and see the obvious things…. I’d be more shocked about the big antagonist reveal if it had actually mattered… which it really didn’t. He might as well have been the faceless unknown “evil” ultimately… he didn’t really do much for the story.

I spent more than 65% of the book hoping Bea would just bite it…. She’s manipulative and self absorbed and I’ve spent want too much of my time dealing with those types in real life to handle them in my fiction too. I don’t particularly enjoy the useless lesbian fumbles after, and swallows every spoonful of poison from the pretty straight girl because maybe she might love her back one day trope… I need my MCs to get some boundaries and self respect and to boot Bea out the door…. And that took way too long to happen. I mean the pacing was a complete nightmare the the tone of it was just darker than dark and not really for any reason other than to be really dramatic made it feel like a gothic telenova. ( )

DNFd

I didn’t like any of the characters. The writing was very flowery. The story was going too slowly for me and I wasn’t engaged.

DNF 25%

So much potential but what actually happened here? ( )