 | Title: Bleeding Hearts
Sexual Content: Kissing Rating:
Okay – A few good points, but with significant flaws. Library/swap/borrow if you want. |
Description
As vampires from all over the world descend on the Drake farm for the Blood Moon gathering, security is ramped up. Lucy has been temporarily banned, for her own safety—and to allow Solange some time to adjust to her new existence. But their enemies realize how much Lucy means to the family, and plan to abduct her to use her for leverage against the new royal family. Instead, Lucy’s cousin Christabel is kidnapped by mistake—and Connor Drake immediately heads off in pursuit, but isn’t in time to prevent Christabel’s infection by the Hel Blar. He can’t save her human life, but he can still try to save her new vampire life, and is willing to put his own life on the line for the girl he has grown to care so much about. Can he save Christabel, the Blood Moon, and his mother’s newly forged Vampire Alliance?
Review
What has consistently been so fun about The Drake Chronicles is the smart and clever dialogue combined with the shifting romances between the various members of the Drake family. Unfortunately, BLEEDING HEARTS isn’t quite up to scratch compared to the rest of this series. In the fourth installment, of the three character POVs (which included Lucy, Connor, and Christabel) not one of them really captured my attention, least of all the newly introduced Christabel, one half of the primary couple.
Christabel is an ignorant human sent to live with her cousin (and Drake family confidant), Lucy. She’s obsessed with dead literary icons and shuns most human interaction preferring instead to lose herself in a classic novel. Normally, I love reading about obsessively bookish characters since they are so relatable for me, but in Christabel’s case, her entire character felt like a bunch of randomly chosen quirks and characteristics cobbled together to fit a specific plot. Why does she only like bad boys? The only reason I could discern was to make the inevitable romance with nice and nerdy Connor feel like it had an actual obstacle to over come (it didn’t). She never felt real, or even really likable.
In addition to the two dimensional Christabel, even the various characters from previous books fell flat. Lucy has been this fun, snarky presence that popped in and kept the Drakes from being too surly or brooding. She kept things light and easy. Or she used too. In BLEEDING HEARTS, she was just demanding and precocious (not even a little cute on a sixteen year old). Every chapter from her POV seemed to drag with annoying perkiness and obnoxious pushiness. Not at all the character I remember.
Worse still was the redundancy due to the shifting POVs. Something would happen, then as often as not, I’d have to read about the exact same scene from two other character perspectives. It made the whole story unbelievably slow and boring. I almost gave up a number of times, but it was only my fondness for the previous books that kept me reading. After being so disappointment this time, I’m on the fence about picking up he next book in The Drake Chronicles series which is tentatively titled BLOOD MOON and, according to the author’s website, the POVs are Solange, Lucy and Nicholas.
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I enjoyed this book better than you did, but the ending is what disappointed me. I got to the last page and went WTF?! It just - stopped. I hate that.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Christabel is not a very memorable character, but I did enjoy Lucy's perspective. You brought up some good points, though, and I enjoyed your review.
Manga - I'm glad you enjoyed it more than I did. I was so excited for this book, but I was just so let down. And the ending...I didn't have to to go into that, but yeah, more disappointment. Did you read the bonus story about the parents?
ReplyDeleteGreat review. I haven't read this one due to the fact that I've heard its not as awesome as the other books were. I'm not sure how I'm going to like Christabel and I'm sad to hear that Lucy lost her awesomeness.
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