This book is awesome! I think that's enough to say about it, but I'll write more just because I loved it so much! Anne Bishop may just be my new favorite author if the rest of this series is even half as good as Daughter of the Blood. There is a combination of magic, mystery, intrigue, and ambitious courage in this novel that kept me reading, and made me anxious to read the other novels in this series (I know that there are at least 7 altogether).
Daughter of the Blood is a book that changes perspective multiple times in each chapter, but the characters are so intertwined that it just makes the plot more interesting. The main people of note are Saetan, Daemon, Jaenelle, Surreal, and Lucivar. Jaenelle is the real star of the story. She is the girl that the rest of the main characters have been waiting for for 700 years. Jaenelle is Witch; she is the most powerful person in Terreille, and will grow up to rule the entire realm, which is currently run by a corrupt priestess bent on world domination. Unfortunately, Jaenelle is still just a young girl. She has not grown into her power, and she is subject to the horrors inflicted on her because her family thinks that she is mentally or emotionally disturbed. Saetan and Daemon and determined to keep her safe because, without her, the world will basically destroy itself.
Daemon is possibly my favorite character just because of how twisted he is. He is Saetan's biological son, but grew up not knowing who his true parents were. He assumed that he'd been abandoned by his father to grow up as a bastard to a mother who didn't care about him. Because of the society of Terreille, Daemon's illegitimacy denied him any social status, despite his innate power, and he is put into slavery. The interesting this about this society is that it is entirely matriarchal; men have little if any political power, and are meant to serve the women in charge. Makes me feel a little bad that the men have no other option, but it's a nice change that women are in power for once. But back to Daemon. Due to his ill treatment by the corrupt priestess, Dorothea, Daemon has a deep hatred of all women. The power he possesses from his Black Jewels (I'm not even going to try to explain that, it'll take too long) means that if he loses his temper, he could level an entire city. Whenever a queen he's been sent to serve angers him, she tends to end up dead, or worse. Yet, he has a soft spot for Jaenelle and her sister, Wilhelmina, as well as a select few other women who have been kind to him over the years. I feel that, if I were his therapist, I would go insane myself trying to sort out the inner workings of Daemon's mind. There are dark secrets that don't come out in this novel, but I'm sure that there are complicated reasons behind the way he behaves.
I don't want to go into deep detail about every major character, so I'll stop with those two. I think that if I talk about anyone else, I'll be giving too much of the plot away, so I'll move away from character description. :)
The novel itself is so easy to fall into. There are a lot of things that need to be explained to the reader about the society and the history of its people, but Bishop does this so smoothly and cleanly, without interrupting the plot line, that I hardly noticed when I learned a new tidbit of necessary information about this world. It's obvious that Bishop put a lot of thought into how the three Realms interact (or don't interact) and what Terreille was like before the overarching corruption took over the Blood. Every new detail Bishop introduces about the people of this world blends in with what she's already told you, and I enjoy the fact that I found no contradictions that have a habit of happening in novels like Daughter of the Blood. Kudos to Bishop for taking so much care in the building of this world, and the characters in it!
I'm going to stop there before I just start recounting the entire plot and leave you with no reason to read it for yourself. I am in love with this series and this author already, and I have already borrowed the next two novels from the library, so it's only a matter of time before I get to find out what happens next. They will not be the next book on my reading list, but they'll be close. Please read books by Anne Bishop. She is a fantastic author, whose writing style can't fail to pull you into the novels that she writes. So exciting!
0 comments:
Post a Comment