If She’s Wicked

This was an epic story. It’ll take you on a crazy rollercoaster of a ride. There’s so many revelations, ones that you won’t see coming. This one will keep you on edge, guessing, trying to figure out what’s going on. It’ll surprise you in unexpected ways. Erie is a force to be reckoned with. So many key players in this story that unravel an even bigger storyline. A definite must read.

WOW What a EPIC journey this book was.
Can i just say that i love all Amelia’s books but this one blew the rest out the water as this story was just epic with the world building and story telling with how she tells this story of Erie and Callaghan from the very beginning and how they came to be.This is a dark read but i freaking loved it.

Amelia never ceases to amaze me in how she pulls you into the worlds that she has created for us to read,just sit back as you will be pulled along with her in this amazing, intriguing journey along with Erie and Callaghan as it’s a huge book,but there was plenty of action and i was glued to this story through out with how it was all unfolding.

I need to have a bff like Erie as she is a kick ass take no crap kind of girl,i absolutely loved her character and what she kept doing to Callaghan was just pure brilliance,as no way was she going take it that she was a walking womb to be used to produce a boy by the Templar Knights to save two races that she totally hates with a passion.She fights them all the way and god i would never want to be on her hit list at all.

There is a huge back story about Erie and Callaghan that we learn,and the torture and abuse that Erie was put through would totally break a lesser being,but i flipping loved how she just keep her darkness to herself and planned for the future on her own and never ever gave up from wanting to be free.We get to meet some of the Fae as well in this story mainly Zahruk and Synthia which i loved and of course Lucian,i was hoping we was going to find out what he is…..damn but no he is very very old so has to be a god of some form, well i am guessing.

The chemistry between Erie and Callaghan is smoking and the sex is off the charts hot,as come on this is Amelia we are talking about and she sure knows how to write a sex scene,these were panty meltingly hot!!!PHEW….loved Callaghan he can be mine any time he wants,as he does have ‘a wreking Ball’.

The ending to this story was just how it should be as when you find out what Erie is you will understand that this is how she wanted it to be.Sorry if that was confusing,you will just have to pick this amazing book up and read for yourself this epic journey that Erie and Callaghan had been on for a very long time.Five Huge Wreking Ball Stars.

Wow just Wow!! This is a fantastic beginning to the series and and amazing spin off of The Fae Chronicles. I loved it!!!

Totally did not expect If She’s Wicked to go where it did. At first I hated Callaghan, but then by the end of it he redeems himself a little. I also love Erie. She is such badass! Definitely one of Amelia’s darker books. I enjoyed the ride, and look forward to reading the next one in the series!

Fantastic read

Can I just put it out there that I absolutely loved Erie!! Erie is the best anti-hero I have read. She is twisted, dark, calculated, and relentless. Just when you thought she was just some kind of pushover she surprises you. Erie is in a league of her own!!! I loved that she started out strong and got even stronger in the end. This was definitely not your typical PNR. There were so many plot twists and just random stuff that you just didn’t see coming. Which at time made my head spin and made it kind of hard to keep up. But it was definitely a fascinating and intriguing read.

UF tale that can also be read as a feminist critique

*Contains spoilers, so proceed at your own risk*

I really, really wanted to give this book 5 stars, and I would have for the first two thirds. But somehow in the last part the plot took an unfortunate turn and the mood changed and I could hardly wait to come to the end (which wasn’t really an end at all).

But first things first: before you start with If She Is Wicked you should read Oh, Holy Knight, which is sort of a prequel; actually it is the same story (at least the beginning of it), but told from a slightly different perspective, which I found an interesting concept that added another dimension. It is set in the same world as the Fae Chronicles, and some of the characters from those stories make an appearance.

I really loved the concept of the anti-heroine with a tortured upbringing, devoid of love and meaningful contact. In a way Erie is the embodiment of a feminist critique of a patriarchal society. She is the allegory of war, but she refuses to fight by the rules of men and constantly undercuts stereotypes of femininity and female behavior/comportment. It’s her that choses her first lover (both times) and in her incarnation as War she is not the one who is taken, but she is the one who does the taking. Also, she is not shy about articulating her sexual preferences.
She also throws into glaring relief society’s double-standard concerning the practice that men could (and still can) have a wife and mistress (and nobody blinks an eye), but women are expected to be pure. Although in defense of Callaghan, the (anti-)hero, he didn’t expect it.

In view of the current political climate in the US it’s impossible not to read the major plot of the story as an indictment: the story focuses on the attempts of various factions on getting Erie pregnant. Erie herself is a strong magical being, the result of the combination of the bloodlines of Templar and Druid, and not only is she the only female Druid in existence, but she is also magically more gifted then all her male counterparts from a young age, which made her an outcast and a target for their cruelty. But now the Templars are slowly dying, and as foretold by a prophecy, only a child from her womb can save them, and time is running out. Callaghan and the Templars are doing everything to try to get her pregnant (and to keep her that way), appealing to Erie’s compassion to save their race. But firstly, Erie does not feel beholden to the Templars, since they made her growing years an unimaginable hell, so she wouldn’t mind the entire race dying out and she refuses to be just a womb and give up her bodily autonomy; also, she is not really the motherly, nurturing type. The irony of course is that the curse that is killing the Templars came about through the murder of an unborn child and the sacrifice of a child that was already born.

I also like Callaghan (at least during most of the first two parts of the story): he is an alpha-hole, but he also tried to protect Erie as well as he was able (although he failed on a number of occasions). I loved their battles in bed and outside of it. I also found it very poignant how he kept his men from telling her what he had sacrificed for her.
But then somehow the mood changed when the focus shifted to their past lives; I liked their past characters a lot less then their present ones and knowing that their present selves were just playing out things that were set in motion in the past somehow took away from the story.

What especially bothered me was that after Callaghan steadfastly refused to use his past deeds to bring Erie to his point of view, he then recounts all his great deeds and sacrifices in an attempt to jog Erie’s memory of her past incarnation, which I found very unheroic and deflating. Sorry, but belaboring your own noble deeds just diminishes them. This should have been handled differently, maybe one of his men could have told her or she could have found out by some other means.
I am not averse to the idea of two souls inhabiting a body, and/or shifters that can change form, and I liked the glimpses of Callaghan’s beast. But I was totally weirded out (and not in a good way), when the beast literally came out and they had these ménage encounters. Not that I have anything against a good ménage, but please not with a shifter that is supposed to be one. This also made the relationship between Callaghan and his beast very strange in hindsight; at the beginning we hardly ever got a glimpse of it and they seemed much more in tune with each other, more like another wilder side of him rather then two distinct persons inhabiting the same body.

And finally, the editing (if any was done) really sucked. I am not overly nitpicky, I can overlook the occasional slip of the pen or some grammatical errors, but there were several instances in this book when the complete wrong word (though it may have sounded a bit similar) was used, which catapulted me right out of the story. The two most egregious instances where “abide my time”, which should be “bide my time”, since abide means “accept or act in accordance with (a rule, decision, or recommendation)”. The other was “He felt it, the power that exhumed from me.”. The right verb her is “exude” (emanate, radiate). “To exhume” means to dig out/disinter a dead body, corps. This enumeration is not exhaustive, there are other semantic errors.

As a reader/reviewer it is not my job (and also not my place) to tell an author what to write or how to write it, I can only criticize the work that is before me. But if I were Amelia Hutchins’ editor, I would not only correct those errors, but also make her rewrite/cut/rearrange the third part of the book, for the reasons outlined above. As it is, I can only give it 4 stars.