Carnival of Souls Review

Carnival of Souls 
by Melissa Marr
From Goodreads:

In a city of daimons, rigid class lines separate the powerful from the power-hungry. And at the heart of The City is the Carnival of Souls, where both murder and pleasure are offered up for sale. Once in a generation, the carnival hosts a deadly competition that allows every daimon a chance to join the ruling elite. Without the competition, Aya and Kaleb would both face bleak futures--if for different reasons. For each of them, fighting to the death is the only way to try to live.

All Mallory knows of The City is that her father--and every other witch there--fled it for a life in exile in the human world. Instead of a typical teenage life full of friends and maybe even a little romance, Mallory scans quiet streets for threats, hides herself away, and trains to be lethal. She knows it's only a matter of time until a daimon finds her and her father, so she readies herself for the inevitable. While Mallory possesses little knowledge of The City, every inhabitant of The City knows of her. There are plans for Mallory, and soon she, too, will be drawn into the decadence and danger that is the Carnival of Souls.

From Melissa Marr, bestselling author of the Wicked Lovely series and "Graveminder," comes a brand-new tale of lush secrets, dark love, and the struggle to forge one's own destiny.

Midnight Thoughts

~One of the main characters, Mallory, and her relationship with her father totally reminds me of the movie Léon: The Professional and Natalie Portman's relationship with Léon, the hitman, played by Jean Reno.  Which of course made me like her immediately.

From AllMovies.Com

 ~The book is bloody, and it's bloody early on.  It stays bloody.  I had no problem with that.

 ~Aya is kick ass.  Seriously, I had trouble thinking of her and Belias as older teens, because they are so much cooler than most YA characters.  While Mallory and Kaleb might be the characters the teen readers connect with the most, Aya and Belias could seriously have their own adult series.  I really think paranormal romance lovers would eat them up.  I know they'll be the reason I pounce on the next book in this series!

~Aya is stubborn.  I get why she keeps secrets, but since I immediately liked Belias, I had a hard time with what she did to him.  But it's not like I could have offered up a better solution, and it definitely makes Aya a controversial character.

~Here be Witches and Daimons.  I hated when demons is spelled with an "ai"  I can handle it spelled "Daemons", but when I see it as "Daimons" my brain wants to call them Day-mons.  Although, since Marr has created a demons that felt more like a were-creature, maybe that's the way I'm supposed to pronounce it?  Confused.

~I was really surprised by how much I liked this book, because I don't always dig the paranormal aspect of some YA books, and I did have some problems with it here.  It's explained several times, by several characters, about the fight between the witches and the daimons, and the resulting wild woods that grew, constantly threatening the city. 

~There was an aspect to the fights I just didn't get: Strong daimons are needed to fight the witches, so why have them kill each other all gladiator style?  I get that it was an incentive to the curs, their one chance to move up in status, and maybe men, especially daimon men, just need to fight.  I mean, I don't get why people want to be boxers either.  So it all could just be me.

~While I wasn't crazy about the mythology of the book, I really liked the characters and all the conflict.  Carnival of Souls has crazy action and the character's are given a real purpose and drive.  Basically I wouldn't care if they were giant Bunnies and talking Toadstools, because I was so intrigued by Aya, Belias, Mallory, Kaleb, Zevi, Marchoias, Adam and Evelyn.  I would totally invite them to my Halloween party.

SPOILERISH

~There is a marriage that takes place in the book without the bride present, so a proxy bride stands in her place.  Fairly old fashioned custom that I didn't have a problem with, but then the marriage is consummated in front of people.  Um, not particularly the stuff of YA, but this book is definitely geared towards the older YA set and adults who read YA, like me.  My big question though, did the actual bride lose her virginity by proxy?  Inquiring minds want to know!

~The relationship, "pact", that Kaleb and Zevi formed was... ambiguous?  I really thought it was sexual in nature for about half the book.  And I'm still not 100% sure, which is fine if confusing.  I look forward to learning a lot more about Zevi in the next book!

END Of SPOILERS

~Overall I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the book.  I will definitely be looking forward to reading other Melissa Marr books, and I'm really glad this got to be my first read by her!

Carnival of Souls gets a Midnight Book Rating of:

**Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book at BEA 2012, all opinion, snark and wit in this review are my own. **