Book Review: Wretched by Emily McIntire

“I don’t want to be loved by the hero. I don’t want to be sacrificed on the altar of saving the world. I want to be loved by the villain. I want to be worshipped above all else by someone who would burn it all down just to be with me and together we would live amongst the ashes.” – ATL Doyle

I wrote the words above after I finished reading Wretched by Emily McIntire. This is the third of her books that she describes as fractured fairytales. The premise of these books is the villain getting their happy ending instead of the predictable hero’s journey where the good guys win and the bad guys lose.

There is something deliciously dark about these books and they are spicy, but what I love most about them is the way they illustrate how thin the line between good and evil is. Broken people with tragic pasts can easily slide into a villain role. Pain and desperation can do funny things to a person. The bad guy in your story might be the good guy in mine. Which of us is right about them? Does it even matter?

There is something intoxicating about imagining a love so fierce and so real that no obstacle exists that can stop it. If love is the end, do the means even matter?

Read one of these books and then see how you feel about the answers to these questions.