Review: Bloodlines

Bloodlines by Richelle Mead

Published: August 2011
Publisher: Razorbill
Page Count: 421
Series: Bloodlines #1
Synopsis: Sydney protects vampire secrets - and human lives. Sydney belongs to a secret group who dabble in magic and serve to bridge the world of humans and vampires. But when Sydney is torn from her bed in the middle of the night, she fears she's still being punished for her complicated alliance with dhampir Rose Hathaway. What unfolds is far worse. The sister of Moroi queen Lissa Dragomir is in mortal danger, and goes into hiding. Now Sydney must act as her protector. The last thing Sydney wants is to be accused of sympathizing with vampires. And now she has to live with one...

Review: After seeing a lot of fuss over The Golden Lily I decided to find out what it was about and found out Bloodlines was the first of the series. Also the word vampires jumped out at me so I figured I'd read it eventually, that eventually turned out to be a lot sooner than imagined as I popped into my local library not expecting to find anything really as its super tiny but low and behold here was Bloodlines. It was until I started reading it that someone asked me if I liked Vampire Academy ...oops, I guess I hadn't done enough research, this series is a spin off series. At first I felt a little thrown off with them throwing words like dhampir, Moroi and alchemists at me because obviously without reading the previous series I wasn't exactly sure what they meant in this world, luckily the book didn't take too long to explain it all to me so the blanks all got filled in. Once Sydney and her "family" arrived to the Boarding School things started to get a little interesting, until a few too many hints were made at certain happenings to the extent that at page 168 I had figured out more or less what was going to happen, though at the time I wasn't sure it was going to happen it was just a guess but it did so I was suddenly very disappointed with the book or myself for not turning my brain off! Adrian grew on me a lot, I didn't understand at first why everyone was raving about him but he was so hilarious! He's definitely the kind of Vampire I'd love to spend the evening with and what he did for Rose without a seconds thought *gushes*. The other characters I didn't really feel that much of a pull towards them, there wasn't much happening other than day to day school life and how do we keep Rose from the danger of dating so it pretty much left me with a neautral feelings because at the end of the day, thats what it was... neutral, average and predictable. Or was it? Well yes... Kind of. I mean what I figured out on page 168, Sydney figured out on 330 so that part was predictable, but what followed (you know the capture and fight scenes) they were pretty great, I liked those a lot and the description put into them, I just wish there had been more moments like that because even though I didn't like that character and felt a little off towards him, I did not expect him to turn on Sydney like he did. In short the last 63 pages were to die for and the rest was a-ok. 

Recommend? I guess it depends on how the sequel is BUT if you are able to switch your brain off unlike me then go ahead.

GR
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