Book Summary (from of
the book)
Just your average boy-meets-girl,
girl-kills-people story...
Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation:
He kills the dead.
So did his father before him, until his
gruesome murder 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: move, 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,
but now stained red and dripping 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.
And she, for whatever reason, spares his life
And she, for whatever reason, spares his life
My Review
I really liked this book, like White Cat and Red
Glove it touches the supernatural, without falling into the amazingly vast
compendium of books who go for the vampire-is-the-only-supernatural-being. Don’t
get me wrong, I like vampire books, I do, but when that’s all you see…well it
just gets boring.
Back to the book. I really liked all the main
characters, Cass, even though he is a little bit too much into this I –can-do-everything-on-my-own
thing, finally let’s people in and his new “group” is as different as
entertaining. Something I like to note is that Kendare presents teens that,
yeah, they are teens, but they also know how to talk, how to interact properly
with each other, a subject that Naiche mentioned in a recent post.
The other thing that I liked about this YA
book, is that even though there is a little bit of romance behind (little, as
subtle) there is a fairly healthy relationship (I mean as healthy as it can get
with a ghost), not only between Cas and Anna, but also the way the Carmel and
Thomas interact with each other and others.
I have
to say, I did not see it coming, the way it ended, and this is good! Often with
YA the end of the book is a bit predictable and even though this doesn’t mean
that the book is bad, it means that you are not necessarily eager to finish it,
because…well, you already know what’s coming. For this one however, there was a
lot happening at the end, and when I finished I went immediately online to make
sure that there is a second part (there is, but for now only hardcover).
I actually was expecting to be satisfied with
the book, the premise was good, the reviews where good with some splashes of disappointing
towards the end. But I was more than satisfied, it gave me some twists and
turns where I wasn’t expecting it and I like that. Is different enough not to
be too far fetch without falling into a cookie cutter!
