Kingdom of the Wicked

Dissapointing.

I got this in the fairyloot for october and I really wanted to love this. It's the most beautiful book fairyloot ever produced.

I ignored everything to give it a chance. I ignored that this was basically a 21st century setting acting like it got something to do with 1880. I ignored that a girl was just running around in a monastery without any issues. That the book basically displayed an italian american restaurant, that fitted much more into New York than it got anything to do with Sicily. I ignored that Catholicism was completely ignored. I tried my hardest not to question and just roll with it.

Even when I figured out, after I started that the book was written by the Jack the Ripper author, which I just DNFed a day before to start this book, I tried to focus on the positive. Aesthetic, witches demons.
Till the 50% mark I even wanted to give it 4 stars, because I saw much improvement compared with the jack the ripper book.

But then, at 50% it fell completely apart.

There is this game, where you get 5 words and you have to build a story with using these 5 words. It doesn't matter if it makes sense, the stories you come up with in this exercise don't have to make sense. It is just used to get some creativity out of you.

This book felt like one such story.

You have this prologue going that raises all these crazy expectations where this will go. And then the story builds up and it introduces all these leads and the magic ideas. And you are like going with it, wanting to figure out what the murders are about and you turn page after page that at some point there might be coherence; that you get this feeling, ahhh now it will all fall into place. But guess what. It won't.

It's all exactly as you thought it would be after the first 20 pages. Lots of plots were completely unnecessary. The whole magic is a mess and follows no logic. Basically nothing follows any logic. It starts even to contradict itself. At points I even completely lost what the intention of the character was. It's all this big sham of nothing.

Also please Maniscalco, please stop writing first person POV. It sucks. Just stop.

And, next time, read Italian authors. Going on Google Maps and looking up a map of Palermo is not research. I mean, there were no descriptions of anything. No art, no culture. The point was to stay as vague as possible to have no issues. But that's not how you write books. People have cultures. Italians are very conservative, patriarchy and catholic. They do NOT let their daughters out at night to do whatever they want. Especially NOT in southern italy. Especially NOT im 1880.
Also, there are two festivals. TWO. Every european city has at least one festival. That doesn't make anything special.

But whatever, it's only "young adult", why would you have the "need" to "research", right.