Poison Kiss by Ana Mardoll
There are a lot of clichés surrounding both female writing and every present fairytales of a mankind and this book is an exclusive game changer for all these stereotypical points of view. Many boundaries will be crossed and altered as you progress with reading. If you nurture rigid, narrow-minded opinions, this book might come as a shock to you or you may even find it repulsive, but if you loosen up your string and just let the plot take you to the journey, the story will open you for some completely different approaches to many everyday issues.
Ana Mardoll did not write an ordinary fiction centered around fairytales. Abandon your expectations that this will be a common story about fairies captivating humans to take them to some wonderland where all the Earth troubles are gone. Quite opposite. This fairytale will present you the idea of evil fairytalish world and inspire you to nourish your love for this world and all the diversity of human faulty world. Reading common literature, you wouldn’t expect any book hero to willingly escape the land of fairies. Main characters of this book will.
Rose and Lavender are two bi ladies enslaved by the May Queen, taken to through the portal into the fairy land to serve the Queen in her evil adventures motivated by her boredom, selfishness, sadism and lust for power. Both of them are promoted into the Queen’s executioners and the sins conducted during this mission will mark them for the rest of their lives. Perhaps the seductive power of evil in the fairy land would turn these two women into obeying Queen’s soldiers if there wasn’t for scarce traces of their memories from their Earthy life that kept them longing for return to the Earth and motivate their escape. Once back to Earth, these two realize they are changed irreversibly, marked by previous traumas and struggle to restore their inner and outer lives back. Rose is cursed with the venom of her poison kiss, which works as a perfect metaphor for physical distance emotionally closed people make after they’ve been hurt one too many times. Psychological background of the story complicates once the Silver man, Clarent, enters the lives of Rose and Lavender. This encounter triggers forming of mysterious community of fairyland survivors, but it also brings the polyamorous relation under the spotlight.
The rest of the story will take you through the journey of these people struggling to establish their routine earthy lives, to freely love and live again, with portals to the fairy land and their painful memories hunting them all the time. Unexpected, creative, but surprisingly logical and realistic plot twists will provide you the insight into the lives of marginalized, lonely, strange people living without support and emotional trauma scars. Mardoll’s story give a voice to all the alienated people out there struggling to live decent life here and it awakens empathy and understanding among common people for all the strangers around us we frequently expel from regular community life.
