The Kiss of Deception

Book Title: The Kiss of Deception

Author: Mary E. Pearson

Series: The Remnant Chronicles #1

Date Started: August 17th 2014

Date Completed: August 26th 2014

Genres: Romance, Adventure, Mystery, Fantasy

Rating: Three stars

Review:

There's been quite a bit of hype recently over this book, and I was really looking froward to picking it up. Unfortunately, however, while I think this story had so much potential, it fell infuriatingly flat of anything exciting and engaging for me.

Lia, the First Daughter of the House of Morrighan, is about to be wed off to secure a political alliance. But in a desperate bid for freedom, she flees on her wedding day, and travels across the country to settle in distant town. But her father won't just forget her defiance, and soon Lia has to be wary of everyone, even the two men lodged in the Inn she works at. But one is an assassin sent to kill her, the other the prince betrothed to her. Can she discover their secrets before it's too late?

The writing had it's fair amount of faults for me. It was very straightforward, which isn't always a bag thing, but I felt like there was actually the baselines of an interesting world, but it's never explored enough to be worth anything.

Furthermore, the narrative just wasn't engaging to me, and each different character sounded exactly the same when they led a chapter. For this reason, I think the book would really have benefitted from a third person perspective, rather than first. This also would have been incredibly useful in the 'who's the assassin, who's the prince' mystery that the book is known for. As it is, it messes up the continuity and characters with a constant, straightforward style in a book that's supposed to be about working out who's who!

Not much actually happens in this book. And that's fair enough, since the main plot device to supposed to be working out the prince and assassin's identity. The problem is, that mystery was solved for me in the first few chapters, because there's very little depth and ingenuity to it. Literally, the first descriptions you get are very obviously pointing to each identity. (Maybe it could've at least tried to give no - or at least little - information about them!)

Something else that really irritated me was the fact that, realistically, Lia should've been dead within the first hundred pages. She's constantly getting followed, and completely unaware of it, and she's constantly doing stupid things. I won't rant, but honestly, she should be dead.

Another problem I had with this book was the vast amounts of information dumping, that wasn't really relevant anyway. The majority of the book is Lia relaying various childhood memories and dragging explanations of a tradition that doesn't end up being very useful. I've already said I had trouble with Lia's narrative, and so going through longish paragraphs about this that and the other just made me skim read, and I actually didn't really absorb any of it.

The continuity also lacked in various places: sometimes Lia was guilty, but the next second she'd be completely fine; she suddenly just knows how to defend herself (don't get me wrong, it's great to have a heroine who can handle herself. But HOW can she handle herself in this situation?).

Oh, and the instant love was just ridiculous.

However - yes there is something that went very well actually - the last pages were brilliant. I considered giving up this book several times while reading it, but I was skim reading most of it, so I was getting through it reasonably fast. I'm very glad that I kept going, because the last few pages were great. Suddenly there was something happening, and the characters finally got conflicted. It is such a shame because if the whole book had been like that, I probably would've given it five stars. (It's now even more annoying because I really want to know what happens next.)

I think, if the characters had had individual personalities and qualities, I might have been won over. But they didn't and I found it really hard to connect to any of them or feel anything towards them apart from annoyance.

I disliked Lia right from the beginning: she seemed bratty and stupid and far too proud. But, at the time that was fair enough, and I was willing to wait for some character development. However, as the story went on, and she continued to be stupid, I pretty much gave up on her. It also really annoyed me that everyone fell in love with her in thirty seconds - she was just too perfect.

Rafe and Kaden blended into each other for me. In fact every character other than the protagonist were there for Lia, and didn't have their own stories or personalities. Neither really showed any indirect remorse or conflict between their duties and what they wanted. And when you really don't get on with the main character and everyone else is pretty much pointless, it makes it very hard to read a book.

Not much happened throughout the whole book, and the only point that that was okay, because of vaguely interesting narrative, was right at the end. But for most of this novel I skim-read because I got bored very easily and just couldn't connect with any of the characters.

While I did not enjoy The Kiss of Deception itself, until the last few pages, I do think future books might achieve the potential available more than the first instalment. To be honest, there's nothing incredibly wrong with the book, it just annoyed me how good it could have been. If you like romance-driven stories and not so much depth in characters and plot, maybe you'll get on with it more than me.

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