Stolen Bloodline

I’ve surprisingly been a busy reader. This is surprising as last week was our kickoff week for Summer Reading. Somehow I managed to start – and finish – three novels. Go me! Since then I completed another book. All in all, I have six reviews to share. Since I have so many, I am going to split them up into several posts.

Bloodline: a novel by Kate Cary

It’s World War I and young John Shaw has returned from the battlefield, plagued by bloody nightmares of his commander, Quincey Harker. When Harker, is invited to stay at the Shaw family home, John’s nightmares take a turn for the worse, as he becomes romantically involved with John’s beloved younger sister, Lily. The two fled for Harker’s home in Transylvania, Romania, and it is up to John and his former nurse, Mary Seward, to follow and save Lily from a fate worse than death.

Told as a series of letters and journal entries written by various characters, this is a vampire tale unlike those popular with today’s readers. I liked how the author mixed her story with the original Dracula myths/novel. I was bored, however, by most of the tale. The excitement was missing, and the story was somewhat predictable. Ah, well. It was still better than Twilight.

Stolen by Lucy Christopher

While on vacation with her parents, sixteen-year-old Gemma is drugged and abducted from a Beijing airport. She wakes up to find herself surrounded by red sands and nearly-barren desert. During the day the heat oppresses; at night the cold nearly freezes. She is alone with her captor, a ruggedly handsome man named Ty. He thinks he has saved her. She is losing hope that she will ever be saved.

Wow. What a story. It is told by Gemma, as a letter written to Ty, and goes from the beginning – right before she was kidnapped – to the end – which I won’t tell you. Gemma starts to feel for her captor. She’s still frightened, but she develops an understanding of why he behaves as he does.

Our library has this book in the adult fiction section, but I honestly feel that it has a lot of teen appeal.

This was one of the books I started and finished within a few days.