Ink Exchange by Melissa Marr
Release Date: April 29, 2008
Publisher: Harper Teen
Age Group: Young Adult
Pages: 336
Other Titles in the Series: Wicked Lovely
Unbeknownst to mortals, a power struggle is unfolding in a world of shadows and danger. After centuries of stability, the balance among the Faery Courts has altered, and Irial, ruler of the Dark Court, is battling to hold his rebellious and newly vulnerable fey together. If he fails, bloodshed and brutality will follow.
Seventeen-year-old Leslie knows nothing of faeries or their intrigues. When she is attracted to an eerily beautiful tattoo of eyes and wings, all she knows is that she has to have it, convinced it is a tangible symbol of changes she desperately craves for her own life.
The tattoo does bring changes—not the kind Leslie has dreamed of, but sinister, compelling changes that are more than symbolic. Those changes will bind Leslie and Irial together, drawing Leslie deeper and deeper into the faery world, unable to resist its allures, and helpless to withstand its perils. . . .
Ink Exchange is the companion novel to Wicked Lovely, which basically means that it is not the sequel to Wicked Lovely, but is still set in the same world and has many of the same characters as Wicked Lovely.
Personally, I like Ink Exchange better than I did Wicked Lovely. To be fair, WL was one of the first fae novels that I’d read, along with the Holly Black series, so I was just getting to know about the glamours and the sight and all that fae lingo.
Ink Exchange is definitely the darker novel of the too, this one is basically about addiction. It revolves around one of Ash’s friends Leslie, Irial, the king of the Dark Court, and Niall, Keenan's adviser.
I love this world that Marr has created where faeries and mortals co-exist. She paints a beautiful world full of mayhem and chaos! And I love that she doesn’t give a happy fairy-tale ending, well the ending that I wanted to see anyway, and yet I find that it was very satisfying.
The characters in this novel are fantastic. You have the Dark Court, which obviously is supposed to be bad, but are they really? Every character is flawed, they have these wonderful qualities and yet they also have these bad qualities. It’s refreshing to be unable to label who’s good and who’s evil.
There was a lot more depth than I was expecting. My first impressions of Leslie from Wicked Lovely were extremely off. She is one of the most complex characters and it was totally unexpected. I really recommend this one for dark fantasy fans.