Blood Trinity - Review

Blood Trinity by Sherrilyn Kenyon

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Last fall, I was going to attend Sherrilyn's book signing at my local bookstore so I picked up a copy of the book prior to the event. I had all of the best intentions to pick it up, but I think I must have read the back cover 20 times before taking the plunge.

Here's the good, bad and ugly on Sherrilyn Kenyon and Dianna Love's "Blood Trinity":

The good - The writing is fabulous. The story progresses at a nice pace. I don't feel that it drags at any point and it had my attention from page 1 to page 518. I really liked some of the characters and I wish that the focus had been more on the VIPER folks rather than on Evalle. Evalle spends a lot of the book by herself, where I would have liked to see her interact a bit more with other people in the book.

The bad - I didn't care much for the central character Evalle. First of all, the girl's name is Evalle. I don't care that early it's broken down that it's pronounced "E-vahl", I'm going to continue to read it as "evil". Second, she's the classic female-with-chip-on-shoulder type that I tend to find rather annoying. This book was also all over the place. It should be noted that "Blood Trinity" is book 1 in the Belador series. I'm not sure if I'm to expect future books in this series to be 17 story lines wrapped into to one or if, as the first book in the series it was trying to introduce all of the characters, or what. Oh, and did I mention that it is 500+ pages long?

The ugly - The resolution for Evalle's dead body in the morgue (of which the story opens with) was COMPLETELY unsatisfying. The body in the morgue gets a lot of things rolling and it's just kind of nonchalantly wrapped up in a couple of sentences near the end of the book.

I know I just spouted off a bunch of criticisms, but at the end of the day, I did feel that "Blood Trinity" was a fun read. I picked it up in the Romance section of the book store, but I didn't feel that it was truly a "romance". There is a romantic interest, but there isn't a central romance - this was an element I liked about it. The Belador series definitely has my attention and I look forward to picking it up when it comes out this fall (2011).







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Finished Reading: Vampire Academy

I wish I could explain why I continue to read the teenage-vampire genre. Most of the time I have no explanation, but I feel like this time I kind of did. I was involved with Big Brothers Big Sisters not long ago. My "match" ended a couple of months ago, but I continue to hear from my little Melissa. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been getting tons of "my summer is so boring" messages from her and when I heard she hadn't had a chance to hit up the library for new reading materials, I thought I would take it upon myself to find some stuff for her to read and snail mail them to her. She was/is really into the Twilight books, so I sought out for something similar, but I wanted to read it first, lest there be anything terribly inappropriate. Thanks to Google and Yahoo! Answers, I stumbled upon the Vampire Academy series. I just finished the first book. As far as young adult vampire romance fiction, I thought it was fairly on par with Twilight, but it is half as long, has a more interesting characters and lacks most of the misogynistic message Twilight so readily poisoned young people with. But this isn't about my dislike of Stephanie Meyer and her woman-hating series. . . Where was I? Oh yes, Vampire Academy. The story is told through Rose, a dhampir (half vamp, half human) teenager. Rose and her very close friend, Lissa (a Moroi or "good" vampire) are students at school for Moroi and their future dhampir guardians. The school is like a Hogwarts for the UV intolerant; it's a heavily guarded boarding school for kids who know about magic. For the most part, the story is about high school politics with a little blood drinking brought up from time to time. There is some forbidden love and vicious teenage girls, but the central focus of the novel is of the friendship between the two main female characters and I really appreciated that element. As this is the first book in the series, there was more setting up the story than having an actual conflict, but I'm hopeful that there is a little more action in the subsequent novels. And I'm really hoping they find a different guy for Rose to be into. The details of Rose's romantic situation is a little icky if you ask me. Regardless, this book was alright. I didn't love it, but I liked it enough to pick up the sequel. I dunno, I'll be interested to hear how 17 year-old Melissa likes it.