Ink of Blood

(I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a review).

(This review may contain spoilers).

I do have some very mixed feelings about this book. It was fairly easy and quick to read. I liked the front cover and the blurb of the book was really intriguing.

Unfortunately, I found it really difficult to connect to the main characters. Part of that was the romance. It didn’t come across as very believable and Tatiana was just a bit too… ‘different’. I only saw her as a vampire, so I had no idea what she’d been like as a human and I think I might have found it easier to connect with her if I’d seen more of her life before she met Victor. The reluctance Victor had to give her to his brother would have come across much better if it hadn’t been insta!love.

I was really intrigued by the world of Thrace. To be honest, I found the world-building so intriguing that that’s why this book gets three stars instead of two. I loved the fact that there were fairies involved and I would have liked to see more of the other creatures that there were.

The elves were quite interesting as well, but I had a lot of questions left by the end of the book. For instance (and I have never yet come across a vampire romance that actually deals with this) how does sex work? How does having babies work? Apparently, many of the ‘normal’ vampire weaknesses don’t apply to the vampires of Thrace, but there’s no explanation about how vampirism works. It’s interesting that the rules are different between the two worlds, but as a new vampire, I feel that, as a reader, I should have been learning about the world through Tatiana… but so much of the book was taken up with the sex that I felt a lot of those answers fell by the wayside.

Speaking of the sex… a lot of the language used actually made me cringe. Then again, there are very few words that I think work. (The c-word was used, which I really don’t like).

The idea of the Feeding House was quite an interesting one, as was the different flavour blood. There were times when I felt certain characters were more incompetent than they should have been.

The fighting was quite interesting, but I was disappointed that Tatiana’s training was completely glossed over; along with the whole falling in love with thing. I was interested by Victor’s relationships with the other characters, but I felt that many of those weren’t explored in the best way they could have been.

I think that, if the relationship had taken the time to be built (they’re vampires. They have eternity to fall in love), I would have found it much easier to believe. As it is… it didn’t feel real to me and not enough time was spent on the other relationships for me to believe in them. There was very little foreshadowing and the best part of this book was the world building. I don’t think I’ll be reading the sequel to this book.