Thursday, September 13, 2012

Anna Dressed in Blood-Review

Author: Kendare Blake
Publisher: Tor Teen
Pages: 320

Synopsis:
Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation: He kills the dead.
So did his father before him, until he was gruesomely murdered by a ghost he sought to kill. Now, armed with his father's mysterious and deadly athame, Cas travels the country with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat. Together they follow legends and local lore, trying to keep up with the murderous dead—keeping pesky things like the future and friends at bay.
When they arrive in a new town in search of a ghost the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood, Cas doesn't expect anything outside of the ordinary: track, hunt, kill. What he finds instead is a girl entangled in curses and rage, a ghost like he's never faced before. She still wears the dress she wore on the day of her brutal murder in 1958: once white, now stained red and dripping with blood. Since her death, Anna has killed any and every person who has dared to step into the deserted Victorian she used to call home.
But she, for whatever reason, spares Cas's life.

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Review: I'm going to start my review off by saying that I absolutely love the cover of this book! I sometimes have a habit of picking a book up just based on its cover. In this case, I picked this book up because I had seen that a lot of people had been talking about it, and it got pretty decent reviews on good reads.

Anna Dressed in Blood is not something that I would have picked up off the shelf for myself. I really wasn't too sure if I was going to end up liking it or not because to be honest, this genre isn't really my thing. I'm happy to say that I was pleasantly surprised. I absolutely loved this book, and I read through it fairly quickly. Cas' world is completely fascinating, and that's what had me hooked right from the first page.

One of the things that I most enjoyed was that this book was set in Northern Ontario (somewhere familiar to me, which doesn't happen to often in books that I come across). Although, the thing that I most enjoyed where just Cas and Anna's characters. Everything that unfolds in this novel is unlike anything that I've read. Blake does  really wonderful job at introducing he characters and including their histories. While the primary characters are really enjoyable, as are the secondary characters, who are also well developed. The entire plot of the novel as well is something that is completely new for me, and its been refreshing.

I definitely highly recommend this book! As I mentioned, it really is not something that I would have just gone into the bookstore and picked up off the shelf for myself. I'm looking forward to picking up the sequel.

Rating: 5 Stars. 

2 comments:

  1. Lovely review, Lynn! So glad you enjoyed this. I remember liking this too but I did not fall in love with it. The second book received a lot of good reviews so hopefully you will enjoy it too. :) I'm a new follower, btw. ^^

    Eunice @ Book Overdose

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  2. I'm really looking forward to the second one! :)
    Thanks for following!

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