Kingdom of the Wicked // Review

Author: Kerri Maniscalco
Published On: October 27, 2020
Publisher: JIMMY PATTERSON
Genre: Fiction, Fantasy
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Synopsis:

Two sisters.

One brutal murder.

A quest for vengeance that will unleash Hell itself…

And an intoxicating romance.

Emilia and her twin sister Vittoria are streghe – witches who live secretly among humans, avoiding notice and persecution. One night, Vittoria misses dinner service at the family’s renowned Sicilian restaurant. Emilia soon finds the body of her beloved twin…desecrated beyond belief. Devastated, Emilia sets out to find her sister’s killer and to seek vengeance at any cost-even if it means using dark magic that’s been long forbidden.

Then Emilia meets Wrath, one of the Wicked-princes of Hell she has been warned against in tales since she was a child. Wrath claims to be on Emilia’s side, tasked by his master with solving the series of women’s murders on the island. But when it comes to the Wicked, nothing is as it seems…

If my life was a TV series, right now it’s be that scene from The Office where Michael Scott just screams “No! NO NO NO!”. That’s me, post-this book.

I wanted to like this so, SO much.

I didn’t.

I am genuinely so disappointed because as you all know, I just read SJTR and loved it so much. I was pretty sure that Kerri Maniscalco was going to become one of my favorite authors going forward, but this book smushed that hope, at least temporarily.

The more that I think about this book, the more I find wrong with it. I have a few nice things to say, but the majority of this review, tragically, takes place in the “dislike” section, so be warned.

**This review contains mild spoilers!!**

• The setting was super neat! The Italian vibes, the delicious food mentions, the monastery – they were all neat ways to throw us into the Italian setting and I’m happy to see Maniscalco continue to branch out with her world-building repertoire!

• The seven princes of hell idea was incredibly cool and something I enjoyed. I love it when there are a group of people who all have similar roles but in little different ways. We got to see 4/7 brothers in this book, and I hope we get to explore them and their intricacies more in the next!

• This book was incredibly disjointed. It was clear that we had a theme: work with Wrath to find Vittoria’s killer. But I feel like we got so lost along the way. A lot of the information was repetitive and/or used for different plot points, which lead to the entire storyline feeling super messy. There were so many little things left hanging – I think Maniscalco tried to introduce a ton of characters to keep the readers guessing over the “bad guy”, but it just turned into us spending 5 pages with one character and beginning a side plot, only to forget about the whole idea and not come back to it for the rest of the book.

• The plot was so convenient, and a lot of things popped up out of nowhere. I loved the mystery aspect of the SJTR books and was excited to read more of Maniscalco’s fun plots, but this one ended up being incredibly easy to unravel from the get-go. Not only that, but she inserts a lot of things that are simply convenient to move the plot along. For example, Emilia has this magical “chalk” that she can use to draw protection circles around herself, which we believe is effective for pretty much the entire book. Then at the end, she draws one and Wrath steps through it, no problem, just like that. This happened many times: rules could shift whenever they needed, as long as they took the plot forward.

• Emilia was an incredibly inconsistent character. She read like she was just a device for Kerri to move along the plot instead of an actual person that I wanted to follow for 300+ pages. She would be surprised at the most normal things, and then would accept this whole new world of mystical demons no problem. We were lead to believe she was heavily motivated by her friends and family, but then she avoided them for the majority of the book. She’d say she wanted to be brave, but then she’d freeze in the moment when it most mattered. She “tricks” one of the Princes into giving her information, but then makes a bunch of incredibly bone-headed decisions that lead to her needing to be saved by someone else. I could tell that Maniscalco wanted Emilia to be a strong character – fine, cool, love it. But everything she did was….not that? I can’t begin even count the times that she “fell to the floor and vomited” because of fear or anger or disgust or whatever the hell she was feeling. I couldn’t get a strong grip on her as a character and thus didn’t care much what she did.

• This book was a lot of telling and not showing. There were a couple of lines like, “My anger turned into intelligence and cunning.” You can’t tell your audience that you’re being intelligent and cunning!! Show me instead! Another instance is with the princes – we’re told that they’re wicked and evil, but every time Emilia interacts with them, they’re unnerving at best. We’re also told she’s smart and clever, but then we see her make dumb mistake after dumb mistake. 

• Her relationship with Wrath was all over the place. I liked Wrath, truly. I just didn’t feel like we were building a stable relationship to last us through the rest of the series. Emilia was very clear on her “hatred” and “distrust” of him throughout the story, but then was shocked when it’s revealed that he has ulterior motives. How are you surprised by this when you’ve spent 80% of the book telling us how evil demons are?? It felt like Wrath “keeping secrets” was just used to cause conflict for Emilia, which was 100% unnecessary. They also just didn’t have nearly enough chemistry to justify Wrath being attracted to her. The dialogue and banter was sometimes fun, but more often it fell into this strange “mentor-mentee” dynamic where Wrath would basically remind Emilia that she was a child and lecture her about being naive, to which she’d have a small internal crisis and then deflect with something “witty” that I guess reminded him why he was just oh-so attracted to her. And THAT ENDING! Have we just decided to toss out everything we’ve spent the past 300 pages flimsily building? Okay, great.

• Speaking of, the Prince’s powers were inconsistent and confusing. Lust’s was by far the most interesting of them all – he’s able to take your sense of happiness and pleasure and twist it to his whim, and then yank it away to leave you floundering in depression. Dark, but awesome! The others weren’t so complex – Envy and Greed could make you feel … Envy and Greed. And despite hearing about how mighty and powerful Wrath was, we really only saw him be “wrathful” twice, and neither time was very menacing. Like, at all.

Again, I’m so sad that I didn’t like this as much as I loved Stalking Jack the Ripper. I’m still planning on reading the second book because I’m holding out hope that the ties left hanging in this first book will begin to thread together, but definitely don’t have as much enthusiasm as I did going into the series.

Like I mentioned above, I really do think this could’ve been a more powerful book if we would’ve had Vittoria as our main character. She was much more free spirited and bull-headed, and her “take-what-I-want” attitude would’ve leant itself to this story, not to mention created some awesome tension with Wrath.

Instead, we got a surface-level plot and a half-fleshed-out main character who’s trying to thrust herself into a world where she’s very clearly in over her head. But hey, at least we got hot demons, right?

My rating:

Have you read Kingdom of the Wicked? What did you think?