Carnival of Souls by Melissa Marr

Year Published: 2012

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 306

Rating: 

In a city of daimons, the Carnival of Souls hosts a deadly competition. Once in a generation, every citizen can fight 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.

In our own world, Mallory knows that her father—and every other witch—fled the daimons’ city long ago. She trains to be lethal because it’s only a matter of time until the daimons catch up with them.While Mallory possesses little knowledge of The City, every inhabitant of The City knows of her. There are plans there for Mallory, and soon she, too, will be drawn into the decadence that is the Carnival of Souls.From Melissa Marr, bestselling author of the Wicked Lovely series, comes a brand-new tale of secrets, love, and the struggle to forge one’s own destiny.

This is a quite complex and intense story. I was actually quite surprised, there was a moment where I thought "meh.. not again.." but then suddenly it picked up again and I really really really like it, especially the development of the story plot and the characters.. Wow.. I just love surprises xp

So, The theme in this story might be a bit dystopia and a bit supernatural/paranormal. There is war between Witches and Daimons (a kind of human-monster) that has been going on for centuries that resulted in a agreement where The Daimons live in The City and The Witches live in the human world. I found that the rule of the Daimons in The City is actually quite simple but degrading esp towards women or even sometimes men from the low caste where they see them as materials for pleasure or other despicable things (and to women where they see them only for pleasures and breed). That is why I found this caste system in The City is really disturbing. In The City, the main important things to do there to stay alive is through fight or become pleasure commodities. Breeding issues in the Daimon world are quite abnormal and this is where everything is getting a bit complicated and interesting as the story goes (including the involvement of witches there).

There are several main characters in this story and all of them are kinda unique in their own way. To be honest, I have to say they are quite bad-ass and I like them very much.

The development of the plot, for me was actually full of surprises. The turned-out of some events were pretty shocking and left me with anticipations. Well, I have to say that I did not really expect it would be that engaging esp when I reached certain pages where I thought the romance would be kind of cheesy (but thank God, it is not, so it saved me from headache).

My general opinion about this book is that this is really entertaining, engaging, interesting, and developed well as the story goes which is pretty awesome. And I kinda can not wait to read the sequel. Because I think the real action stuffs and adventure will begin in the second book. So, really look forward to it :D