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In Blue Bloods by Melissa de la Cruz, Mimi, Schuyler, and Bliss are all part of an ancient race of vampires called blue bloods. On their fifteenth birthday their blood starts turning blue and glowing, they feel dizzy and weak, start preferring raw meat, and also start remembering their past lives.

They quickly find out that vampires aren’t anything like Hollywood portrays. They are actually angels who fell with Lucifer cursed to walk the Earth as vampires until they are let back in to heaven.

This book was recommended to me by a good friend and I was initially really interested. I loved Melissa de la Cruz’s Disney Descendants books and I was really hopeful to like this series, too, because I LOVE vampires. I was really disappointed when it didn’t become my new favorite series.

The writing was really slow at the beginning and I wondered if I was in a book hangover from As Old as Time, so I put it down for a few days (more like a week). I did some blogging, read a bad romance novel (my guilty pleasures), and worked on some of my own writing.

I went back to it last night and didn’t see a difference. The first 34% of the book (according to my free Kindle app) was slow, confusing, and otherwise really hard to get through. The plot dragged on almost too long to the point where instead of handing the reader answers it was opposite, I didn’t get any answers. Which I normally love, but problems that come up on page one still weren’t answered by page 65, however, I didn’t need them answered because I already figured it out. There’s a fine line between keeping me interested and giving me work. And this stepped quickly into giving me work territory.

Which could have been fine, if I loved the characters. I’m very much a character development type of reader. I fall in love with characters easily and they become my new best friend. In Blue Bloods, thethree main characters Bliss, Schuyler and Mimi are all shown through switching point-of-view in third person limited. However, they’re all very similar flat characters (rich, pretty, cookie cutter fifteen year olds) and the point of view switches come without warning. So, it tends to become very confusing, especially for someone like me that remembers a character’s personality first and then the name. They all have similar personalities so it took me until chapter 8 to finally figure out who I was following when.

Finally, the biggest issue I had with this book was the fifteen year olds drinking and smoking. I understand that they’re really millions of years old vampires, but it seemed forced. And the only (kind of) explanation we got for them doing this was that they were rich and in New York. I’ve read books with teenagers drinking and doing drugs in them (Perks of Being a Wallflower being my all time favorite book), but this seemed forced and out of place here, and it threw me out of the story quite often. (The book is also put out by the Disney publishing group, Hyperion, so it was completely unexpected.)

That all being said, there were some things I liked about it and why I bought the second book, Masquerade: A Blue Bloods Novel. After that 34% mark (where they’re at the Informals ball) the plot actually does pick up quite a bit. I loved how de la Cruz incorporates Christian mythology into her story of how these vampires came to be.

Then comes this underlying mystery of silver bloods hunting them and killing the teenagers and they have to find out who among them are the silver bloods. (Which is mentioned in the first few pages, but doesn’t really come into play until this point in the book.) Then, the characters start gaining substance once you find out who they were based on in mythology. It was at this point de la Cruz hooked me and I rediscovered why I love her as an author. The world building is what made me stay.

Finally, I bought the second book because de la Cruz did to me what she so often did in the Descendants novels, which was end it at a very strange spot. I still have questions that should have been answered, I still don’t trust Charles Force, and simply, I want to know what happens. I may not have been sucked in like a lot of series I read, but out of sheer curiosity I am continuing on, so obviously it can’t be that bad.

Overall, I’m giving it a 3/5 and I really hope I like the second book better.

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