Blood Bound Book Review

Major Spoilers are included in this book review. Please proceed with caution.

If you want to check out my book review on Moon Called, the link is here.

I have officially finished the first two books of the Mercy Thompson series. Written by Patricia Briggs, she has crafted a somewhat believable fantasy world. I only put “somewhat” because Blood Bound was written in 2007, so a lot of things were outdated like no texting, social media, the newspaper, etc. That is absolutely no fault of the writer’s, and I actually enjoyed the old ways of communication like talking on the phone and using email to have a causal conversation.

The series is about Mercy Thompson, who is a walker. She can shift into a coyote and has resistance to vampire magic in addition to toxic werewolf masculinity. That’s what I call the werewolf submissive / dominance idea… It’s directly tied into Mercy’s love triangle with Adam and Samuel.

The plot of the second novel is about Mercy helping out her vampire friend Stefan with a problem involving his seethe. It then quickly escalates to a vampire hunt to stop the rising of violence in the Tri-Cities and to protect the innocent from dying. The main villain is a sorcerer vampire, a demon who has possessed a vampire.

I actually examined the drawn map for this novel, the Tri-Cities, and I was able to follow it pretty easily. Everything is exactly where it’s supposed to be, and having a map visual made reading this novel an interesting experience. Seeing how Mercy traveled from point A to B was made abundantly clear.

Mercy’s characterization was much stronger in this book. This is written in first person, so we are really inside her head, following her thought process out, and it was fascinating. Her naval gazing, the prose, sometimes felt too educated. When she used the word effluvia, it broke me out of the realism abruptly because I had to look up what that meant. Then I wondered how she would even know a word like that.

effluvia  means an unpleasant odor.

All the other characters are written consistently for the most part. However, no matter what I do, Stefan looks like Stefan Salvatore (The Vampire Diaries) inside my mind. This is a personal issue that I’m strangely okay with it. He got a lot more character development in this book, and the vampire seethes and their rules are explored further too. Similar to how we learned about werewolf pack laws in the first book.

Overall, I blasted through this book in two weeks and appreciated everything. If Kingdom Hearts 3 hadn’t come out last week, I would’ve finished way sooner. I’m jumping into the Iron Kissed, the third book, later tonight. Reading is fun!