Book Review - Fragile Eternity #3 of the Wicked Lovely series by Melissa Marr

Goodreads summary:
Seth never expected he would want to settle down with anyone—but that was before Aislinn. She is everything he'd ever dreamed of, and he wants to be with her forever. Forever takes on new meaning, though, when your girlfriend is an immortal faery queen.

Aislinn never expected to rule the very creatures who'd always terrified her—but that was before Keenan. He stole her mortality to make her a monarch, and now she faces challenges and enticements beyond any she'd ever imagined.
In Melissa Marr's third mesmerizing tale of Faerie, Seth and Aislinn struggle to stay true to themselves and each other in a milieu of shadowy rules and shifting allegiances, where old friends become new enemies and one wrong move could plunge the Earth into chaos. 

Reader's review:  Boy, this is a hard one. I've never done a book review for a third book in a series, and I'm finding that what to say and what not to say is far more challenging than I thought it would be. Since the books in this series need to be read in order for them to make sense, then I guess it all boils down to one question: If you've already read #1 and #2, should you go for #3? I'm going to give a hesitant yes with this one. The world Marr creates is one that I thoroughly enjoyed in the first book, and with this third installment of the series we come back to that - more so than is seen in Ink Exchange. Her writing is just beautiful and I kept finding myself lost in all the splendid and beautiful details of the faerie world. This book again is about choices and about deceit and mostly about what it means to love. I enjoyed the conflict from each viewpoint and the ending, while not what I expected, will resonate with younger readers. There's a different sort of love triangle in Fragile Eternity than those most commonly found in other YA books, it's a conflict not between loving two guys, but between loving one while lusting for the other. Yet it's not in anyway made trivial. Again, I'd have to say that it's worth it to read the third book and sometime this year - after I get through my other two-foot high stack of books-  I'll probably pick up the fourth book just to see how it all turned out.
Reader's score 4.

Writer's review: If you love beautiful prose, then this book is definitely for you. Marr's talent for description is out of this world, and I think it was this that really pushed me to keep reading. The descriptions of winter and summer meeting and making love was done so vividly (and differently even though it was seen multiple times) - I loved it. And I love all things flowery, viney, and earthy so I was in heaven during most of the book. I've heard that Wicked Lovely is being made into a movie and will probably see it just for the world-building alone.

What slowed me down a bit was the faerie politics - and believe me there's a lot of it. Keeping it all straight - the motivations, thoughts and feelings of each faerie king/queen/consort/mortal was probably the hardest part of this book, and a lot of it was done by telling rather than showing which made it all the more difficult. But, when you're dealing with characters whose actions and thoughts don't always mesh, I can see why (some of) this was necessary. Unfortunately the groundwork for all the politics occurred in the first half of the book. Nothing exciting really happens until about the midpoint, so I can see why some might give up on it. I'm one of those readers who has to finish a book once I've invested some time in it, and I'm glad that I did because I loved how the ending sets stuff up for the third book. Score: 4