Review: Blood's Voice

Title: Blood’s Voice 

Author: Áine Massie

Pages: 400

Review Source: the author Áine Massie

Rating: **

Back of Books Synopsis (from goodreads):

Anya Millar had no memory of her life or an instruction manual on how to navigate the insane world of humans, biting, and reality. Instead, Anya has had to learn to navigate the world of love, life, and sanity while avoiding those that would see her dead or enslaved.

This is the ongoing journey of Anya and Nicholas, human loving vampires and the human they love, Declán. What makes it all more complicated is that they are abominations in their own world and Declán is a natural born vampire hunter called a Guardian.

Anya must come to terms with who she is and her missing past, Nicholas must win back the object of his eternal love while dealing with new cravings in his silent heart, and Declán must learn to destroy the very creatures that he has unequivocally given his heart and blood.

My thoughts:

First of all, there are a ton of good reviews on this book so my opinion will not be very popular. And for that I am sorry. I think the idea behind the story was really good and unique but I could not get passed the technical issues. I know I have positively reviewed books with technical issues before but in those cases the issues did not trip me up constantly and force me to have to put it down out of frustration.

The sentences were awkwardly worded in some cases, and in others they just did not make any sense at all. The tenses shifted a lot though out the story and there were instances where there were incorrect words used. (ex. “Involution” which means entangled instead of “evolution” which means to change over time.. although another of my problems was that I could not tell what the point was in a lot of the internal thoughts like in this case. So I guess "involution" could have been the correct word choice)

I am also not a fan of first person narratives; the character has to be really exceptional for 1^st person to not get annoying after time, and I really could not feel a connection to Anya -- maybe because the language used was very formal and none of the characters had distinct voices so they all sounded like Anya, the narrator.

There was also a lot of dialogue and not enough action. The characters would talk about what happened and so the reader would not see the events as they unfolded.  It took away some of the immediacy that could have been felt through some of the situations that had the potential of being very tense.

Ok I feel like I am being super negative and I hate that.

Like I said in the beginning, the story/idea for the story was very good. I really liked the fact that instead of the usual Twilight-ish theme of the male being the vampire, that the powerful and potentially dangerous character was Anya, a female. I also really liked the Nicholas/Declán/ Anya relationship going on. I thought it added a lot of really great complications. I also liked that in the beginning I was not sure that Nicholas was who he said he was or that he was looking out for Anya’s best interest. I think Áine created a wonderful world and a unique story line with lots of potential.

I am going to do something a little different here since I enjoyed the story and it was the technical aspect that made it less enjoyable for me I am going to give it two different ratings, an overall rating and a rating for the story by itself 

I give it (technical aspect + story) **

 Story by itself would be ****