When My Heart was Wicked by Tricia Stirling {review}

When My Heart Was Wicked
by Tricia Stirling
♦publisher: Scholastic Press
♦release date: February 24th, 2015
♦hardcover, 192 pages
♦intended audience: Young adult
♦stand-alone
♦source: from publisher for honest review

"I used to be one of those girls. The kind who loved to deliver bad news. When I colored my hair, I imagined it seeping into my scalp, black dye pooling into my veins.

But that was the old Lacy. Now, when I cast spells, they are always for good."

16-year-old Lacy believes that magic and science can work side by side. She's a botanist who knows how to harness the healing power of plants. So when her father dies, Lacy tries to stay with her step-mother in Chico, where her magic is good and healing. She fears the darkness that her real mother, Cheyenne, brings out, stripping away everything that is light and kind.

Yet Cheyenne never stays away for long. Beautiful, bewitching, unstable Cheyenne who will stop at nothing, not even black magic, to keep control of her daughter's heart. She forces Lacy to accompany her to Sacramento, and before long, the "old" Lacy starts to resurface.

But when Lacy survives a traumatic encounter, she finds herself faced with a choice. Will she use her powers to exact revenge and spiral into the darkness forever? Or will she find the strength to embrace the light?

Review: While When My Heart was Wicked was an interesting read and a very short one at that, I found I kind of struggled through it, begrudgingly picking it up each time.  I wasn’t easily drawn into the plight of the main character, Lacy, and couldn’t get into the writing style, turned off both by the use of first-person present tense which left me feeling a bit removed from everything going on, and by the addition of random offensive material that I wasn’t sure why it was in the story at all (i.e. Lacy talks about how one of her teachers racially slurs a classmate on a daily basis and everyone seems to think that’s alright because the teacher is, in general, “a douche”). Still, at times the writing is intense and takes us along for Lacy’s struggle to control the mean spirit that her mother brings out in her, her grief for her father and her old life, and her love/hate relationship with the unpredictable mother who abandoned her and has now resurfaced.  There were times I felt for Lacy and other times I just felt letting herself go down a dark road, using her mother as an excuse to become that person again.  I did like that she was smart and that she was very close to her stepmom who taught her natural magick. She seemed to love practicing light magic, but also seemed to have a pretty flimsy grasp on that desire when it was challenged.

I appreciated the parallels that the author created between Lacy and Holden Caulfield while she's reading Catcher in the Rye. I could completely see how Lacy would see herself in that character. I also liked the friendships she made while at her new school, though at times the guy, Martin, seemed more like a 12-year-old than 16 or 17.  

I did like how through most of the story, it’s never actually clear if the magic that Lacy believes in is real of just her own feelings of power (or lack thereof) over her own life. I was really enjoying that as a theme, then suddenly the story takes a bizarre twist and the magic becomes very literal---it was kind of jarring and, for me, took away from the impact and emotion of seeing Lacy realize that she can decide for herself if she wants to be good or evil.

I can’t pinpoint if this book just wasn’t what I was expecting, or not what I was in the mood for---either way, the story as a whole just didn’t work for me.

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