Bloodlines (Bloodlines, #1)

by Richelle Mead

[empressbrooke]

This book was pretty terrible. The Vampire Academy series was excellent, so I was really glad that there was a spin-off. After reading Bloodlines, I wish Richelle Mead had quit while she was ahead. There are a number of things going on here:

Internal inconsistency. There were so many examples, but the worst one was how they're supposed to be closely guarding Jill to keep her from getting assassinated, but more than once she's out of their sight and missing for an entire day before anyone notices. In the universe Mead set up in the previous series, it doesn't even make any sense that Jill's guardian left her alone for such long stretches of time, or that their plan to protect her would inherently require her to be unguarded all day.

The characters are also internally inconsistent. If the goal was to write a sequel following the characters from the first series, one would think that Mead would write them the same as she did before. Instead, they're like cartoony cardboard cutouts. The main character is supposed to be really, really smart, but all of her actions are actually really dumb. She misses solutions to mysteries that would be obvious to any 7-year-old who read a Nancy Drew book.

Fake suspense is built by everyone keeping secrets from each other. Not only does the central mystery require the reader to be as dumb as Sydney who can't draw the most basic connection between facts, but all of the characters are hiding key plot points from Sydney and she just accepts it. This seems to serve the purpose of keeping the reader in suspense, but instead it just made me angry that no one was communicating and the plot was so flimsy that it would fall apart if people just talked to each other.

The writing is just awful. YA vampire novels can be well-written; Mead wrote an entire series before this one demonstrating that. But she either phoned this one in or declined an editor or farmed it out to teens who wanted to write Vampire Academy fanfic. It was a glaring example of telling-not-showing syndrome, and there are endless examples of the main character summing up entire scenes by saying things like, "I briefly recapped what happened" or "We hashed out a plan" or "I briefly explained what he had said." The word "recapped" is used excessively, and it's all done "briefly" for some reason.

I spent the entire book thinking I ought to put it down and move on to something better, but I carried on in this misguided sense that it would get better. I'm definitely stopping this series here and pretending it doesn't exist. If you loved the Vampire Academy series, I really recommend not even starting this one at all.