As Blood Rages

by Bitten Twice

[Rinn]

Also posted on my blog, Rinn Reads.

This review is quite hard to write, because I really wanted to enjoy this book. It was very promising to begin with - one thing I've noticed about many of the paranormal romances I've read, is that they're very basically written. The authors tend to avoid description, and I was happy to see that this book was not one of those.

It is mostly difficult to review because I found a lot of the book confusing and hard to follow. I don't know if it's because I haven't read the first book, so I don't want to mark it down for that reason since that's unfair. But events just suddenly happened, there seemed to be no build up, and things that I would've thought to be drawn out or important happened in a flash. I also had no real idea about the characters - what did they look like? What about their personalities? This is probably due to the fact that I haven't read the first book, but it would've been nice to get a refresher perhaps. I also had a hard time keeping track of relationships and what people actually were - vampire, daemon, whatever. I read so many chapters without really absorbing what was going on it, and events moved on so quickly, and there was also a lot of information just thrown at me within the first hundred or so pages. In one part of the book, Alex and Lina have to drain the blood from Lucifer in order to gain information and memories. They do this so easily, it just seems ridiculous - it required no effort on their part whatsoever.
I also spotted quite a few clunky sentences, and there was a lack of commas in many places. The author also reused several phrases, and the word 'preternatural' appeared far too many times - 'preternatural' is to As Blood Rages as 'chagrin' is to Twilight. One major flaw I spotted was the constantly changing name of Alex's dog. One minute he was called Jesus, the next Zeus. I wondered if I'd misread something and there was actually two dogs, but I re-read parts and I'm sure the text only ever referred to one dog. He'd be Jesus one sentence, then Zeus the next!

That said, I enjoyed the mixture of Greek religion and Christianity within all of it. Alexander the Great as a vampire is certainly a concept I haven't seen before!

Overall, I had high expectations for this book when I started it, because the author uses description rather well, but it didn't really meet them. I found it hard to follow, and the characters were very flat. I also didn't understand why it was okay for Alex to be with Jack, but it was not okay for his wife to have an affair.