A Kiss of Deception by Mary E Pearson starts as a traditional story of a princess is search of her freedom. In this instance, our princess is wanting her freedom to marry for love rather than alliance. The story takes a slight turn from the traditional when she runs away essentially leaving her groom at the alter. Enter the jilted prince and an assassin from a far away land and you have another slight veer from traditional.
The story written in this book is what kept me from putting it down and forgetting I even tried to read it. The story is different and, while some of it was predictable, some of it was surprisingly unpredictable for a love triangle.
Sadly the basic story is all this book had going for it. The author didn’t develop her characters well so you never truly felt anything for Lia one way or another. The author did well with describing places to a point. But more like she chose somewhere from real memory and put it on paper rather than drawing some from memory and some from her imagination. The writing is confusing and half the time it takes a few paragraphs to figure out who’s perspective you’ve jumped to and how far into the future she made you jump. I think it was this writing style that frustrated me the most. Frequently the author would skip ahead only to very slightly summarize anything from an hour to a full day that had passed. Usually the summarization was so vague I really didn’t even know what I was reading.
Alas, we have a major plot twist. Unfortunately the plot twist only took me by surprise because of the author’s terribly confusing writing style…or maybe she wrote like that on purpose. Maybe she wasn’t clever enough to create surprise in the story itself. And now I am being mean! I told myself I wouldn’t do this!
Ahem, okay. Let us continue. So during a long arduous journey (to where I will not name), we meet even more characters that we do not get to know very well and we pass a good amount of places that are too vague in description to get a good picture of. It was then that I started noticing that the culture in this land makes zero sense. Clothing being one of those cultural inconsistencies that actually do matter.
So in closing, I would give this book a single star if it weren’t for the mostly romantic ending. It would have been an amazing ending had the writing been better. Nevertheless , I feel that the ending earned the book an extra star leaving my final rating at 2 stars. I will be starting on the second book of the series, The Heart of Betrayal, tonight. I hope Mary E Pearson’s writing will improve a bit with this next book.
If anyone else has read the book, please let me know your thoughts!
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