Fortune Favors the Cruel by Kel Carpenter and Lucinda Dark

Fortune Favors the Cruel by Kel Carpenter and Lucinda Dark
Dark Maji #1
My Rating: 2.5 stars

Goodreads blurb: Quinn Darkova, freed from the chains of slavery, wants nothing more than vengeance against those who sold her. But with her dark powers on the rise and her ascension nearing, Quinn's blood retribution will have to wait in favor of her immediate survival.
Lazarus Fierté is a nobleman without equal. He’s as controlling as he is stubborn, and for the last six years he’s been waiting for a woman to appear—but not just any woman. A Maji of great power, capable of terrible things. She could be the key to everything he holds dear.

His savior … or his destroyer.

The only thing he didn’t predict was that she would become both.

I actually considered DNF-ing this one a few times, but I kind of kept expecting it to get better, and it just didn’t. It felt like this book was trying to be something it wasn’t, i.e. a dark fantasy, with two anti-heroes as the main characters. A story of dark powers and dangerous intrigue. I’m not sure exactly what it was about the book, maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood for it, but it just fell flat for me. The magic was kinda cool, but that was about it.

The main character Quinn has a dark sort of power, but on the whole, she’s really not that dark. Nor is Lazarus, who is, of course, very broody and mysterious and arrogant on account of being some sort of wealthy noble. His ‘mystery’ just felt really forced to me, like maybe they were just waiting as long as possible to reveal his motives and his power so that they could explain that in the next book. It doesn’t even have a big reveal. We don’t really even get hints about his magic until quite late, except that it’s very ‘dark’.

Where Quinn became the apathetic cold to the world, Lazarus burned with a savageness that could not be contained. At the core of it, he was right that they were no different, but in the way the darkness showed—they were far from the same.

The romance, if you could call it that, is very slow. They are obviously building up to it for the rest of the series. The characters don’t even seem to like each other, it’s more a case of their magics call to each other because they’re both so ‘dark’.

Quinn’s behaviour doesn’t make sense to me, and I think it’s because they were trying to make her seem more ‘dark’. She has been a slave most of her life, so yes she has a troubled past, which we are only told tidbits of, and she wants revenge on someone. She also has a dark power, which works on absorbing and controlling people’s fear, though it seems she can basically do what she wants with it. My issue is that in the beginning she was trying very hard to keep her power contained or hidden with an amulet, otherwise she would be caught and killed for being what she is. 

For most of her life, she’d worn some sort of barrier—chains or stones meant to mute it, to cage that darkness inside her. The trouble with cages is that eventually the beast breaks free.

However, when the amulet gets broken (not a spoiler, this happens early on) she doesn’t try to control her power at all. She just uses it, gets caught immediately, gets saved by Lazarus and then continues to not try and control her power. She goes looking for trouble and doesn’t care if she draws attention to herself. For someone who is described as being a survivor, it just really didn’t make sense to me that she would act that way, like she didn’t care at all. It does describe the fear as being like a drug for her, but I felt like I was told that, but it didn't actually show in her behaviour.

I will not be a slave to anything. She meant it, and that included fear itself. It was her drug. Her addiction. Fear gave her power, but giving in to it also stripped her power away, and she could not allow that.

This definitely needed proper editing. Sometimes the sentence structure and tenses get a bit confused, and the descriptions are deliberately vague. I feel like maybe it would have been better if it had been written in first person, so that we could understand the characters a bit more, especially given that it’s split POV between Quinn and Lazarus. Oh, and there’s a few random dream sequences that I still don’t understand, not sure what that was about at all. I suppose it was some sort of allegory to Quinn's ‘dark’ power, but maybe they’ll explain it in the next book.

From the beginning the book just didn’t quite capture my full attention. Even though there is action (at times) and mystery and an intriguing brand of magic, I feel like there is just something missing in the writing. Again, maybe that was just me, there were a lot of 5 star reviews on Goodreads.

“When the only thing left to fear is fear itself, you should still run, because she will find you.”

The little chapter headings are very cute and entertaining. I love when chapters actually get named. Except I'm not sure if this sentence even makes sense:

Blood Contract

"The price of freedom is greater than all but one - survival."

- Quinn Darkova, former slave, prisoner, possibly deranged

Overall I think this book had potential, but suffered from a case of trying too hard. I picked it up because I thought the blurb was intriguing, and the cover/title were cool. Unfortunately it just didn’t live up to my expectations. I haven’t read much dark fantasy, so I guess I was hoping for more with this one. If you’re looking for something with a new and cool magic system and morally ambiguous characters, then give this one a try. Just know that there’s 4 books in the series, and this one takes quite a while to actually tell you anything. 

Happy reading!

If you enjoyed this review you can follow me on Instagram @iwishiownedabookstore and feel free to add me on Goodreads 💗