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BooksHorror

The Immortal Rules (book 1 of 3) by Julie Kagawa (ebook review).

This is book one in ‘The Immortal Rules’ trilogy, all of which have now been published so you can buy all three if you wish to marathon without fear of a cliff-hanger mid-series ending.

TheImmortalRules

Allison (Allie) Sekemoto lives in a world inhabited by vampires but not your sparkly kind. These vampires have taken over the world and keep their humans trapped ‘for their safety’ within cities. To be fair, if you do make it past the highly guarded massive concrete wall around the city, you will come across the rabids. These are vampires that didn’t quite make the change properly and now are like some kind of vampire zombie cross-breed who live only to find human flesh to eat. Most humans are tagged and owned by the vampires and are required to donate blood regularly and, if a donation does not come easily, then it will be forced. Allie chose not to be owned and so lives a life where she has to fight and scavenge for everything she needs to survive. Allie is not alone in this, but this only makes her survival that much more difficult as she needs to fight others to survive. Very early on in the book, Allie is faced with a decision where she has to decide between her survival as something she loathes or dying.

Allie’s world is so strange and desperate that the vampires stop the humans from doing anything that might give them the means to rebel. This includes stopping them from reading, so books are forbidden in this world and only very few people are able to read. Luckily, Allie was taught to read by her mother, but this only means that she can read the few books she has hidden away that teach her about the world before the vampires.

During the book, we discover how vampires came to exist, which was interesting and I would have liked to know more about this element maybe having some flashbacks to give more of a background to the whole event. Maybe this was what I felt was missing, just a little bit more history rather than being thrown in at the deep end with very little context. Other authors have managed this well but, in this instance, I just felt lost and bored a lot of the time.

There are loads of twists and turns and reveals throughout this book which makes it tricky to review as I really don’t want to spoil it for anyone. Having said that, I didn’t find the plot held my attention particularly well or the characters for that matter. There is a bit of a love story going on between Allie and another character but it involved far too much teen angst for me to really care much about what happened. Honestly, a lot of the time I really couldn’t see what the point of the story was as it didn’t seem to go anywhere for me. This made me most unhappy as I was really looking forward to reading this book as I’d heard so many good things about it. This makes me think that it was just not a book for me rather than it actually being no good altogether.

The end of the book wasn’t done neatly so I guess it’s a cliff-hanger but, as I don’t really care what particularly happens next, it was so much of one for me. But if you do enjoy the book please be aware that this is definitely not a tidy ending, in fact it really is just an introduction to the other books in the series. At least, that was the impression I got.

Overall, I really did not find this book enjoyable and in fact it was quite a chore to get through at times. I might well read the others in the series as I own them, but they will not be something I’m desperate to read soon.

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Sarah Bruch

September 2015

(pub: Harlequin. 512 page eBook, 2012. Price: $ 1.99 (US). ISBN: 978-1-84845-094-3)

check out website: http://www.harlequin.com/storeitem.html?iid=25751

 

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