Stephy Reading Challenge - Book 1

 

Bound by Blood

by

Amanda Ashley

This is apparently the second book of a series and someone on GoodReads said you would need to read the first one to understand what was going on in this one. 

Nah.

I understand what was going on.

It was just sort of shit.

I feel like I should state that I have read quite a bit of romance novels in my time, so don't come at me when I complain about the typical romance novel shit in this book. My issues weren't because of a lack of knowledge of the genre. This book just did it badly.

Let me lay it out for y'all:

This book is about Zack and Katelyn. Katelyn is a half-vampire, half-human from a clan or whatever of Born Vampires. Zack is an Other, which just means he was turned into a vampire. And of course, the born vampires hate the ones that were turned. This means of course Zack and Katelyn fall in love.

Now, if the book just focused on that plotline, it would have been good... ish... But it didn't. So it wasn't.

Also that plotline had no real conflict. Katelyn spent about 12 hours being all "we can't be together!" before giving that up and being all in love. And then her father (who, *gasp* would never approve!) spent about two days being all "He is the enemy" before apparently just shrugging it off.

Characters were equal parts annoying and boring. Zack had moments where I was slightly amused by him, but not enough for me to actually give a shit about him. 

It took 42 pages to get a physical description of Zack. And then after that, almost every new character got an info dump of physical descriptions. I can't even remember what Katelyn was supposed to look like, but I remember her car was baby blue. 

So much head-hopping. So much. 

The entire book takes place over a few weeks. I think. And we went from Katelyn and Zack meeting to getting married. Within a few weeks. Now, I am aware that characters in romance novels move pretty quickly, but damn, guys. Paranormal romance books sometimes explain away the fast-paced romance by introducing things like lifemates and such. That ONE person you can be with for hand-wavy fiction reasons. But this book did not have that. 

And the good parts...

Uh... 

I liked that Katelyn's father, Drake, apparently turned into a cat. That was nifty.

I enjoyed the sometimes banter between Zack and Drake. 

That's all I got, really.