Tag Archives: Julie Kagawa

Julie Kagawa: The Forever Song

Book review, World of Books April 14, 2014 Leave a comment

“Allie will embrace her cold vampire side to hunt down and end Sarren, the psychopathic vampire who murdered Zeke. But the trail is bloody and long, and Sarren has left many surprises for Allie and her companions—her creator, Kanin, and her blood brother, Jackal. The trail is leading straight to the one place they must protect at any cost—the last vampire-free zone on Earth, Eden. And Sarren has one final, brutal shock in store for Allie.

In a ruined world where no life is sacred and former allies can turn on you in one heartbeat, Allie will face her darkest days. And if she succeeds, triumph is short-lived in the face of surviving forever alone.”

I’ll say it right from the start I should have seen one of Sarren’s surprises for Allie from the start but I didn’t. All the better for dramatic effect which was rather great. 🙂 And rather convenient for Sarren.

I very much enjoyed the ending to the Immortal series. forever song

The thing that annoyed me (again), is the level of stupidity teenage girls achieve in the YA novels. I think that that particular trend needs to stop. Being a teenage girl doesn’t mean you’re so emotional you lose all common sense. I don’t see it happen with young male heroes.

But in Allie’s defense, she did learn from her mistakes and in the end I was rather proud of her emotional growth. Of course, love helped.

The great thing about this book is that the story progressed rather quickly. I am always surprised how time passes quickly in dystopian worlds. It seems like something happened a long time ago only so you can learn it was actually only a year since Allie was turned. So much has happened in the meantime it feels like years passed between, although if I had given it  a bit more thought, I would recognize the fact that not so much time had actually passed.

I also kind of started liking her vampire brother Jackal. He is the bad guy with a slight tendency toward the good side. 😉

It was very satisfying to see Allie and Zeke finally fall completely in love and be together. And of course be better because of it. 😉

The ending brought some surprises – one I saw coming and one I didn’t. That is why I love Julie Kagawa’s writing, even though the type of story follows certain rules and you can guess some subplots, some, you are completely unaware of. 🙂

 

P.S. Seems humans will never learn not to tamper with viruses.

 

Julie Kagawa: The Eternity Cure

Book review, World of Books February 28, 2013 1 Comment

This is the second book in the Blood of Eden series, I’m not sure how many will there be in the end, one more for sure. I was lucky to receive my copy through NetGalley as it’s not yet out.

So, where to start?
I was everything while reading this book – annoyed with Allie (and Ms Kagawa consequently), thrilled, upset, at the edge of my seat, crying, my heart broke for the characters, basically everything. 🙂

Which makes me think the book is rather great even though I had my doubts in the beginning when Allie rather openly displayed what I consider to be a completely wrong view people have of teenagers. But that’s just my opinion.

Here is the blurb:

“How do you face the end of eternity?  

In Allison Sekemoto’s world, there is one rule left: Blood calls to blood  

She has done the unthinkable: died so that she might continue to live. Cast out of Eden and separated eternity curefrom the boy she dared to love, Allie will follow the call of blood to save her creator, Kanin, from the psychotic vampire Sarren. But when the trail leads to Allie’s birthplace in New Covington, what Allie finds there will change the world forever-and possibly end human and vampire existence. 

There’s a new plague on the rise, a strain of the Red Lung virus that wiped out most of humanity generations ago-and this strain is deadly to humans and vampires alike. The only hope for a cure lies in the secrets Kanin carries, if Allie can get to him in time. 

Allison thought that immortality was forever. But now, with eternity itself hanging in the balance, the lines between human and monster will blur even further, and Allie must face another choice she could never have imagined having to make. “

Even if you read the first book, this doesn’t tell you that much. After my initial displeasure of Allie’s behaviour, I got immersed in the story and wanted to see what will happen. There were some unexpected turns which I didn’t see coming. (yaay, finally! I love that!)

And then we approached the end and I thought I knew what was going to happen, then I read on and thought, “Oh Ms Kagawa was brave with this ending”, only to have my initial opinion confirmed.
Besides, it’s the one I prefered to the brave one. But I can already see so the problems arising in the next book because of it.
And not to confuse you, I enjoyed the book a lot but it’s dark, gruesome and reminds me a bit of the Passage (you know, post-apocalyptic dark world inhabited by monsters with very little people left and declining).

Julie Kagawa: The Immortal Rules

World of Books April 22, 2012 Comments: 3

I seem to be stuck in the YA niche. 🙂 Not that I mind.

And it’s turning out to be a dystopian, futuristic YA worlds I’m reading about. In this one, the vampires live in cities and humans are registered and kept practically as cattle because they are registered in order to give their monthly supply of blood for vampires and that is all they do. They survive for only that reason.
Then you have the Unregistereds who do not want to give blood but at the same time, cannot gain the food. So they are forced to scrounge and find whatever they can while remaining hidden from vampire powers.

And then we have Allie, who hates the vampires with a vengeance and of course, runs into trouble that causes her to become one.
As usual I won’t go into the details of the story, there is so much I could write about it. The world is well detailed and well described so you can imagine it without any problems.
The reasons how the future world came to be dominated by vampires and how people ended up as nothing more than vessels of vampire food is described as well.

As you could expect, there must exist a place in this world where people live where they aren’t food, but it would be too much to describe how we get to know about that part. 🙂

The stuff I found both interesting and frigthening is how after an apocalyptic event in the world’s possible future, it wouldn’t take long for the people to lose much of the knowledge they now have. If you remove the books and no knowledge gets transfered to children, after 2 or 3 generations, no one is  able to read any longer.

What bothered me a bit about the book is the fact that everything always falls exactly right for Allie, even when it seems it’s going wrong, in the end it turns out right. Not to mention the fact that at some points, I was rolling my eyes at how blind/stupid people can be, but then again, it could be just my low tolerance of stupidity (which I know I have).

But, the world building is great, you really feel pulled into it and there are zombies! Kind of. 🙂

Even with these little things I thought could have been done better, I didn’t feel like stopping with the reading and finding something better (which is a clear sign for me the book is not really good) and I’m already looking forward to the next book in the series, so on the whole, I think it’s a good addition to the YA pool of novels.

My copy of the book was provided through http://www.netgalley.com/