Emerjas

After 100 years of cursed sleep, Aurora awakens to a prince’s kiss to find that everyone she knew is long dead and the kingdom has been plagued with problems since her curse began. Confused by everything in this new world, Aurora finds that her life has been turned into a fairy tale where she is awakened by true love’s kiss, saves the kingdom with her return, and lives happily ever after with her prince. But the more she learns about the present, the less sure she is that marrying the prince is the best way to save her kingdom.

A Wicked Thing is a Sleeping Beauty retelling set after the kiss in which Aurora attempts to navigate a foreign world where she cannot truly trust anyone. Instead of the happily ever after the books of her promise, she finds herself in a dark and dangerous situation where the wrong move can mean death for her or for others.

The book focuses on Aurora and how she’d be after waking up a century later. Instead of falling immediately for the prince who kisses her, she’s horrified that a stranger kissed her while she slept and even more horrified to discover he was not the first. The kingdom’s many changes over the century confuse her, and she feels lost with all that she once knew well now unfamiliar. And the fact that her entire life is being planned out for her by other people without any say of her own does not help matters. The book focuses on the mess of feelings that Aurora has over everything and does a good job of capturing just how lost, confused, and frustrated a person would be in this situation.

The other characters don’t get much depth in the story. They’ll have hints of depth from time to time, but the focus is very much on Aurora. However, since a decent amount of the book is dealing with Aurora’s reactions to her new environment, I didn’t mind that everyone else didn’t get much development in this book. There were enough hints at depth to give me hope for them in the next book.

There were three potential love interests in this book, but not a lot of actual romance, which I liked. Aurora had bigger things to worry about, and she knew it.

A Wicked Thing does a great job focusing on Aurora’s feelings and reactions to the confusing world she wakes up to. The plot is a bit slow, but the story itself never dragged for me because Aurora’s mind was always interesting to explore.