WTF Is This // Wicked Like a Wildfire

Title: Wicked Like a Wildfire

Author: Lana Popovic

Pages: 400

Publication date: August 15, 2017

All the women in Iris and Malina’s family have the unique magical ability or “gleam” to manipulate beauty. Iris sees flowers as fractals and turns her kaleidoscope visions into glasswork, while Malina interprets moods as music. But their mother has strict rules to keep their gifts a secret, even in their secluded sea-side town. Iris and Malina are not allowed to share their magic with anyone, and above all, they are forbidden from falling in love.  

But when their mother is mysteriously attacked, the sisters will have to unearth the truth behind the quiet lives their mother has built for them. They will discover a wicked curse that haunts their family line—but will they find that the very magic that bonds them together is destined to tear them apart forever?

This book...wtf. What is this book? What happened in this book? Why is this book? What does seeing things in fractals and making other people see things in fractals even mean? Why is doing this important? These are just some of the questions that plagued me throughout the reading of this bizarre book, but they are just the tip of my confusion iceberg. I didn't understand what was going on for most of it, but by the end I'm pretty sure my entire thought process was just "WTF" over and over again.

I wasn't sure if I was even going to read this all the way through. At first, I thought the writing was pretty but didn't love the story, but stuck with it for the sake of flowery words. However, by the middle of the book, even the writing style started to annoy me. It was just too pretty with not must substance and it was trying way too hard. I also didn't feel like it was very YA either, since it was much too formal in a weird way.

The writing also didn't match the protagonist, Iris, as a character. Iris was always characterized as the rough and tumble sort of twin and Malina was the pretty delicate twin, so it didn't make sense to me that the voice was so formal and flowery. The writing was flowery and sweet to the point that reading it practically made me nauseous because it was trying so hard to be lyrical or whatever. In addition to that, I felt like the characterizations were weak as well. They were just very simplistic, and even though the relationships between the characters were supposed to be complex, I just found them very predictable and flat.

Wicked Like a Wildfire is a book I really should have DNFed, but I was halfway through it by the time I realized that. It was very superficial in a weird way, with the pretty writing on the outside but confusingness and simplicity on the inside. Basically, don't let the cover or the pretty writing at the beginning fool you: this book is not worth it.