Book Review :: Carnival of Souls, by Melissa Marr

Carnival of Souls by Melissa Marr
on July 31st 2012
Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Paranormal, Young Adult
Pages: 306
Goodreads

In a city of daimons, rigid class lines separate the powerful from the power-hungry. And at the heart of The City is the carnival, where both murder and pleasure are offered up for sale.

Once in a generation, the carnival hosts a deadly competition that allows every daimon a chance 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.

All Mallory knows of The City is that her father—and every other witch there—fled it for a life in exile in the human world. Instead of a typical teenage life full of friends and maybe even a little romance, Mallory scans quiet streets for threats, hides herself away, and trains to be lethal. She knows it's only a matter of time until a daimon finds her and her father, so she readies herself for the inevitable.

While Mallory possesses little knowledge of The City, every inhabitant of The City knows of her. There are plans for Mallory, and soon she, too, will be drawn into the decadence and danger that is the carnival.

Last updated on 6 April 2022

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What is Carnival of Souls by Melissa Marr about?

Carnival of Souls (also called Carnival of Secrets and Untamed City) is a story of two worlds: Mallory’s human world, and The City, a places where caste-system daimons live, where Kaleb and Aya live.

Years prior, witches were thrown out of The City and now live in the human world, while the daimons rule The City. Each year there is a chance for daimons to move up the castes, right to the top, ruling caste, by entering and winning a fighting competition.

Kaleb wants to win so that he and his packmate, Zevi can have a better life. Aya wants to win and get to the top so she can change The City. Mallory lives in the human world with her adopted witch father, Adam. While she knows that witches and daimons exist, and Adam has been training her her entire life to fight the daimons, she’s never encountered one before.

One day she meets Kaleb. Kaleb has been sent to find Mallory, from The City, but he falls in love with her, and refuses to kill her. Mallory doesn’t know that Kaleb is a daimon, and Kaleb doesn’t know that she knows that they exist.

It gets a little confusing at points, but there we have it. Meanwhile, Aya is fighting her way through the competition, and talking to witches in the human world. Eventually, Mallory is drawn deeper into The City’s world, secrets are revealed, connections are made, and the world gets a little crazier.

My thoughts on Carnival of Souls

I really liked this book. I managed to pick it up in a sale bin one day a little while ago, not really knowing that it existed prior to me finding it. I don’t know of anyone else who has read this book in real life, so I would LOVE to know if you’ve picked it up and what you thought.

At the beginning I really liked Mallory, but as the book progressed, I liked her less and less. At the beginning, I really didn’t like Aya, but as the book progressed…I really liked her. It was an odd sort of thing really. I quite liked Kaleb for the majority of the book, and I really liked Zevi’s minor role. While there were really weird aspects and some things that I didn’t like, the whole story and the world that Marr created was really neat, and I wanted to read the second one as soon as I shut the covers. However, I don’t think there’s a second one at the moment, and it doesn’t look like there are immediate plans for a second, according to Melissa Marr’s website. Ah well.