Oxblood (The Victoria Asher Novels, #1)

by Annalisa Grant

[readingwithwrin]

4.5 stars
"He could have studied his ass off in Miami and pursued his mission there. But clearly, we Asher kids don't take the easy way. When we're in, we're all in."

See reviews first on my blog

I went into this book with no expectations, I had never read anything by this author before and wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. I am so glad I did it this way. The prologue hooked me immediately I needed to know why she was in this situation and how in the world she was going to get out of it.
Victoria is a young woman who is working at a diner and has no real idea what she wants to do with her life. So instead she uses her brother going to law school as a reason for not going to school and furthering her education. While her brother is away in Italy for school, her and her best friend have end up living together with the occasional stop in from her Vic’s freeloading boyfriend. I loved Vic’s best friend and how she helped her not be so uptight about thing sometimes. We all need a person like that in our lives. As for the freeloading boyfriend he needs to go, and I was so happy when Vic finally stood up to him.
"It's the being in a hollow metal tube thirty-five thousand feet in the air and crashing in a fiery blaze that gets me."
When Victoria realizes something could be terribly wrong with her brother’s trip though, she gets on a plane and leaves for Italy even though it terrifies her. Once there she realizes how hard it is going to be to find Gil. She also meets a certain someone who ends up showing her a whole new world that she didn’t even know existed while at the same time finally giving her a purpose.
"Train me. Put me to the test. If I fail miserably, you can send me home. But don't sentence me to a life of worry without at least giving me a chance. I know I can do this."
As she starts to work with the team and gets to know all of them, we see her start to grow confidence, as well as feeling like she is a part of something and helping. I loved how the whole team worked together yet, was each an individual as well. They are their own little family that will do anything to protect one another.
"We do a lot of things. Protection. Surveillance. We make sure secrets stay secret.”
Once she is involved with the team though, bad things start happening and some in the team start suspecting she might be a mole, but who the real mole was will surprise them all.
Overall I really loved this story and I can’t wait to see what happens in the next one and I hope it comes out really soon! I really liked how all of the characters that were in the team had their own back stories and while we got to know a little bit about them, there is also still a bit of a mystery about them. As for the romance I wasn’t surprised when it happened, but I was a bit surprised that it became such a big part of the storyline. I was glad though that it didn’t influence Victoria’s decisions though and she stuck to wanting to find Gil and not just get swept up in this man. Who might I say sounds very dreamy and I do want to see how they’re relationship changes as the series goes on.
"This is far from the end, Ian. This is only the beginning."
This is older YA towards even NA age range, just without the sex scenes.


Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an e-ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.