Ink Exchange is Melissa Marr's follow up to the book Wicked Lovely. Three days later, I may have forgotten the plot line, but I haven't forgotten the 'faery world' or the characters in it - apart from Leslie who made no impact on me at all. There is so much potential for stories told with these characters and their histories, but this particular one missed the mark. In all honesty, the only reason I liked this book was because of the theme (faeries, a touch of passionate violence and slightly-forbidden love) and because of Niall (my leading man) and Irial, whom I may or may not have slightly fallen in love with (they remind me quite of bit of the Salvatore brothers from the Vampire Diaries I read back when I was a tween). Personally, I felt Niall and Irial deserved more of a woman to fall in love with. I also felt the love connections in this book were more one sided, whereas the relationship between Aislinn (who, to me, sounded far less mature and queen-like in this story than she did in her own novel and wasn't a very likeable character in this either) and Seth felt genuine and un-forced. It was practically over before it began, leaving me unsatisfied with the 'ending', if you can call it that. The flow of Ink Exchange was really erratic and seemed to jump all over the place at the expense of the characters beginning to sound 'inauthentic' - the dialogue became merely a means to quickly steer the story to a particular scene or direction that inevitably, didn't really lead anywhere. The main character, Leslie, wasn't the strong lead I was hoping for, and her fixation on a tattoo 'changing her life' didn't really feel plausible for me. In this case, for me, it was for the lovely Niall and Irial, two men whom I would personally love to spend some more time with. Once again, you don't read this series for its spectacular writing or even its ability to neatly start and finish a story - its purely for the theme and perhaps the characters.

Ink exchange book