Book: 60/100
After an attack on St. Vladimir’s, a school where living vampires and half vampires train and live, Rose Hathaway watched her teacher and lover become an evil, undead vampire. Remembering the promise she made to him when they first met, Rose starts hunting down Dimitri with the hopes to kill him and free his soul from his present monstrous state.
Rose heads to Russia and meets Sydney Sage, an Alchemist. The Alchemist’s are a secret group that works to hide the supernatural world from humans. They themselves are human, and regard Moroi, Strigoi and Dhampirs pretty much the same – evil, unnatural creatures who shouldn’t exist.
For a human with such a strange perspective, she isn’t that bad, and she helps Rose go to the Dhampir village where Dimitri grew up. There she meets his family, and tells them of his turning into a Strigoi. She also meets another Spirit user and their Shadow Kissed partner, and learn that with enough practise the Spirit user can heal the Shadow Kissed.
Rose leaves the village with a Strigoi hunting group, and is captured by Dimtiri. He takes her captive and makes her addicted to his bites. He also wants to turn her into a Strigoi herself, but Rose manages to keep saying no to him. She stays there a long time, not really captive anymore because she is so addicted to him. She can still read Lissa’s mind, and sees that she has made a new friend, Avery Lazar. Avery is a very bad influence on Lissa, making her drink and party, and that brings an ever widening gap between her and Christian. Lissa accidentally kisses her ex while she’s drunk, and Christian breaks up with her.
Rose finally manages to escape and kill Dimitri. She helps save Lissa through the help of the other Spirit user, and they realise that Avery is also a Spirit user who wants Lissa to be bonded to her – that means Lissa has to die first. Rose intercepts this and they manage to defeat Avery and her cronies.
When Rose arrives back at school, they take her back without much questioning, and she promises to give Adrian a chance. She tells Lissa that she learnt that you can restore a Strigoi to its original state by some obscure way, but they first need to break out Victor Dashkov from prison as he is the only person that knows how.
Once again, Rose’s world crashes down when she receives a letter from Dimitri telling her that he didn’t die and is coming after her. Will Rose manage to break Victor out from prison and save her great love?
Rating: 5/10
This was another book in the series that seemed unnecessary. Dimitri holding Rose captive took ages to reach a conclusion, and their fight afterwards was so ridiculously long that it might have stretched over fifty pages.
Dimitri didn’t inspire fear as a Strigoi for me. He wasn’t scary, he seemed like he was a kid playing a big game. If he was so strong and ruthless, why did he just not turn Rose into a Strigoi without her permission?
The inclusion of Avery Lazar was exceptionally redundant. She doesn’t even feature later on the books and her tale has no significance to the storyline.
The few good things that happened in the book:
Abe Mazur’s introduction
Meeting Sydney Sage, which is extremely important to Bloodlines.
The tip that a Strigoi could be saved (although that could have been worked into the beginning of Spirit Bound)
I did like the fact that Rose finally did something for herself, and not because Lissa wanted or needed it. She walked away to go free the man she loved, and did it on her own terms. Nothing her best friend tried would stop her, and I really respected that. She still isn’t my favorite lead of all time, but as the series progresses, she does grow, and so does her control on life.
Life of this city girl 