Darkest Mercy (HarperCollins, 2011, ISBN: 9780062078377) by American author Melissa Marr is the fifth and final book in the Wicked Lovely series of young adult novels. This character-driven urban fantasy serves as a fitting conclusion to an engaging story.
Darkest Mercy: Summary and Review
In Darkest Mercy, Melissa Marr focuses once again on the characters of Aislinn, Seth, Donia and Keenan, who are featured prominently in Wicked Lovely and Fragile Eternity but skipped over, for the most part, in Ink Exchange and Radiant Shadows. Fans of the Dark Court fairies will also be pleased, as Niall and Irial are equally central.
Darkest Mercy depicts the lead-up to a war that will involve all the fairy courts, as the embodiment of war (Bananach, a name drawn from fairy folklore) attempts to incite them to fight amongst each other. Readers will likely find her attempts laughably bad, as the fairy courts only grow increasingly unified in their determination to end the “threat” posed by the raven-haired fairy. I doubt that Marr intentionally set out to create a villain as inept as Bananach, who showed promise in earlier novels; rather, Marr seems disinterested in the central conflict except as a vehicle to bring her protagonists into new alliances and interactions.
The novel is primarily concerned with conversations between characters about the coming war, to the extent that some readers may wish for it to hurry up. Yet devoted fans understand that it is the conversations and the interactions that give the series its charm, and will be quite content to lounge about with an entertainingly unhinged Niall in his dark palace or a tough-as-nails Donia in her winter garden while they wait for the action to start.
The novel’s highlights and lowlights typify the series as a whole. Marr’s writing style, while consistent, is not particularly interesting; she has a tendency to accompany a line of dialogue with extensive internal monologue that, with the series now in its fifth outing, has become repetitive. The strength of the series, and the reason for its success, can of course be found in the characters that people it. Donia, Seth, and Irial are particularly well-drawn. Even Aislinn, who could challenge Bella Swan for the Blandest Heroine Award, finds her backbone in this novel and manages to pull off a few memorable scenes. As always, the peripheral fairies make for an enjoyable backdrop, wild and alien and unpredictable. Wicked Lovely fans will be hard-pressed to find fault with this entertaining conclusion to the pentalogy.
Wicked Lovely Movie Update
The Hollywood Reporter writes that Universal Pictures has decided to rethink their decision to translate the first book in the Wicked Lovely series into film. According to IMDb, the film was scheduled for release in 2012. Whether or not the project will be picked up by another studio remains to be seen.
Heather Fawcett - Heather Fawcett is a Vancouver-based writer and editor. She holds an M.A. in English Literature and specializes in teen fiction, having ...
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