My Love Lies Bleeding (The Drake Chronicles)

by Alyxandra Harvey

[Leah]

For a while now I've been wondering whether to buy My Love Lies Bleeding by Alyxandra Harvey. It sounded like such a good read but I wasn't totally sure if I would enjoy it and, as such, I never got around to buying it, particularly after I read a friend's review of the book and she wasn't a huge fan and I trust her judgement. However, with the second book being released in July, the publishers decided to put My Love Lies Bleeding up on their website for anyone who wanted to read the book to download. I jumped at the chance to read the book for free and, without intending to, I got stuck in immediately.

All of the different vampire books all set out their vampire mythology differently; Twilight has the Cullen's with their 'vegetarian' ways and sparkly skin, the Blue Blood series has a fascinating vampire history (and is actually my favourite of all vampire mytology) and now we have the 'Drake Chronicles' with it's very own vampire mythology. There's a hierarchy to the Drake Chronicles set of vampires, with a queen, then there's the fact no female vampire has ever been born, only turned, until Solange. And then there's the different types of vampires; which baffled me completely. There's the Helios-Ra, the Hel-Blar the Drake's themselves, and others; I can't check the names of the rest because the book was only free on the 5th of July. It's safe to say, though, that the vampire hierarchy of the Drake Chronicle books are far, wide and very complicated. I would have to read the book again to fully grasp who everyone was, but I got the general gist of it, enough so that I could read the book with the littlest of confusion possible!

What I really liked about My Love Lies Bleeding is that it's dual-y narrated by both Solange and Lucy, giving us insight into both girls' lives. There's Solange, the first female vampire born in centuries, causing the current 'Queen' Lady Natasha to begin to worry about an old prophecy and who starts to think Solange wants to take her throne. The reader knows different though; becoming a vampire Queen is the last thing Solange wants. I enjoyed Solange's point of view, but not as much as I enjoyed Lucy's. Lucy is Solange's human best friend and has grown up with the Drake's ever since she was little so is au fait with the fact they're all vampires. Unlike most girl characters, Lucy was feisty, argumentative and willing to do anything to help her best friend and I admired that completely. It's so refresing to find a teenage girl who doesn't pander about to a boy, or shy away at the first sign of trouble. That's not to say Lucy doesn't find herself in a romantic pickle; she does, with Nicholas, the youngest Drake boy. They argue and fight which (quite quickly) turns to romance and the romantic in me lapped it up completely. Because of how quickly it happens, it could have seemed forced but it doesn't at all and I just loved Lucy and Nicholas together, they sparked off each other so well.

With all of the different types of vampires floating around, as well as the huge Drake family, there are a lot of characters to keep up with in the book. I loved Lucy and Solange, their friendship was believable and they worked well together. As for the rest of the Drake clan, I thought they were great to. OK, so I can't name them all (there are 7 Drake brothers, plus their parents and various relatives) but despite such a huge cast of characters, it kinda works. A list of characters at the beginning of the book wouldn't go a-miss but if you can separate who everyone is (the Drake's from the Hel-Blars and the Helios-Ra, not everyone separately with names) then you're good to go. Hopefully we'll get to know the brothers a bit more in the next books in the series, to help separate them a bit more from each other because, currently, the only two that stood out were Nicholas and Logan, so it would be great to get to know the other brother's a bit more.

My Love Lies Bleeding is a great opening to what is probably going to be quite a series. It sets the scene perfectly for any further books and I can't wait to get book two in the series. It's very well-written and I enjoyed getting to know both Lucy and Solange. I enjoyed Lucy more, she was such a great female character and I so hope she appears in the later Drake books because it would be such a waste for her to fade into the background. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the book, I wasn't expecting to, but I whizzed through the 250+ pages. 250 pages is fairly short for a book and I could definitely have read on for at least another 100 pages but it was a well-proportioned book and it didn't feel rushed at all. I can't wait to get my hands on Blood Feud and get stuck into more of the Drake family and Lucy.