Hello there guys!
I hope your weekend is going great and most of my fellow bloggers are taking part of the 2015 edition of
Book Blogger Love-A-Thon! I will be taking part as much as my work schedule will allow me to, which won't be as much as I'd like!
As this week's
Saturday Pages review I have a book that was highly recommended (read: relentlessly pushed on me) by Octavia from
Read Sleep Repeat and I must say that boy, was she right to insist that I read it already! Thank you so much for making sure I read it, Octavia, now I shall be the one pushing this one on everyone!!
Written in Red by
Anne BishopMy rating:
5 of 5 starsWritten in Red has been one of those books that I had in my radar for a while, even more since my bloggy friend Octavia flailed about it like a mad woman (let me tell you something right away, she HAD VERY GOOD REASON TO DO SO!) so much that she sent me the ebook as a Xmas gift!
Still I didn't start reading this book until I got approved for the third book eARC on NG, so that was the push to finally read now instead of later! I seem to need a ticking clock of time telling me I need to read something before this date to get me started... *shakes head at procastinating self*
So listen to me, if you've been wondering about starting this book, do it now!! I loved it SO MUCH!! And I'm kicking myself for not having read it earlier!! This is adult urban fantasy and it deals with very adult themes, oh and if humans as something other than top of the food chain bothers you... you might not like this book.
The world of this series feels both familiar but at the same time extremely alien from ours. Humans are not the only sentient species and they sure aren't the ones calling the shots, and the furry and fanged aren't exactly the ones you might have met in other UF books. The Others or terra indigene might take human appearance but they are something entirely "Other" and non-human, that consequently doesn't act or think as humans and that have rather minimum to none regard about human wants or wishes.
All human cities have a Courtyard where a number of The Others live, to trade with and to make sure the humans don't forget their place in the natural order, otherwise they'd just go overboard and take more resources and dump more waste and basically do what we do in our world... Meg Corbyn arrives at the Courtyard of Lakeside while running away from the man that held her prisoner all her life and finds herself surrounded by the Others, that have to decide between allowing her, a human, sanctuary or simply eat her as an unwelcome intruder.
Meg is not your regular human either, she hides a secret from the Others, because she's being hunted and she'd rather die than be taken back. Soon she finds herself carving a lil place for herself as Human Liaison for the Courtyard and although her secret is found out pretty soon because she isn't used to fending for herself and doesn't know much about the world. Still, she conquers the Other's hearts, from Simon Wolfgard, who rules the Courtyard, to Erebus, the elder of the Sanguinati, not to mention Tess, the terra indigene that no one in the Courtyard knows what she is, AND to Winter and the other Elementals.
This book has some amazing world building, with a world so similar yet so different from ours that sometimes you end up forgetting about the differences until you get a reminder, in the same way the humans get a reminder that the Others still consider them meat. And despite all that, I found myself siding with the Others most often than not! I liked very few of the humans in this book and there came a point when I was rooting for some of the terra indigene to either eat or kill humans. Seems like my species loyalty is rather limited!
Then the characters, Simon the Wolf is both alien, scary and somewhat endearing in his dealings with both Meg and his nephew Sam. You could consider him an alpha, but given that he isn't human, I don't think he should be judged by human or regular human shape-shifters standards. Meg is not just your regular human either, and she starts the story running away and then hiding and she's somewhat child-like at first, but she's a combination of knowing too much and too little, and I was rooting for her from page one! The relationship between Simon and Meg is slow, tense and full of moments that will make you wonder, cringe, laugh and swoon and you'll end up shipping them like there's no tomorrow, or at least, I very much did! I was very happy to see how slowly it is developing, because anything else wouldn't have felt right for the characters or the story!
I feel like I could spend hours talking about the different kind of terra indigene, like Vlad and Erebus the two main Sanguinare (their name for vampires) and Tess (our unknown, kick arse terra indigene that runs a cafe) and other Wolves like Nathan and Sam. Sam is a character that got to me so very much. He's a puppy that's traumatized by his mother's murder in front of him so he's refused to get out of a cage for years and has not taken the human shape since then. Then Meg comes along and finds a way to get him our of both cages, the literal and the figurative one. Let's not forget some of the few humans that I actually liked and cared about, like Heather and Merri Lee, employees at some of the Courtyard stores, Montgomery and Kowalski police officers in charge to dealing with Courtyard matters and Burke, their captain, along with Ruth, Kowalski's wife.
The villains were either big unknowns orchestrating from afar, or petty and stupid humans with no real sense of what they were doing. For Asia Crane all was part of her ambitious game of being a famous actress one day and she didn't seem to care about who was injured or the consequences for the bigger picture. This can seem two-dimensional, but unfortunately there are plenty of real humans like this, so I was hoping she'd get eaten since her first interaction with Meg.
I simply ADORED this book!! I loved it and started recommending it before I had even finished it! Brilliant book, brilliant start of a series and if you haven't read it yet... GO READ IT NOW!! Extremely well deserved 5 stars (and a few more!) to Written in Red!!
View all my reviews
