a few words on Blood Promise
Nov. 20th, 2009 09:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
serynI finished Blood Promise by Richelle Mead. It's the fourth book in the Vampire Academy series.
I don't think I really get the premise, but assuming the world works like that, I enjoy the books because they consider some really difficult topics. The topics are held at arms' length by the lens of speculative fiction, so we have main characters with friends who die gruesomely, friends that are tortured, frank discussions of things that are worse than death, and an examination of personal morality in the face of really hard choices.
I think this is the kind of thing that is best served by fiction, where it exposes people to different situations than they would otherwise experience and hopefully the characters' experience in the books will help if there ever is a real life crisis. Parents are always giving advice and saying "You should learn from my mistakes so you don't have to make the same ones yourself." Books are good for seeing someone else's mistakes in dealing with situations too.
I really enjoy seeing the party girl from the first book buckle down and get serious. I liked seeing her cope with her first adult-level peer relationships with sarcasm. I enjoy seeing a young woman's confusion about why she just isn't interested in attractive guys who happen to like her.
I also really enjoy reading how the main character's decision to protect her best friend means they stop being friends because the main character has to keep her own concerns to herself. I don't particularly enjoy how the best friend gets wrapped up in trivialities and takes zero responsibility for any of her decisions, ever. But I know people like that myself.
This book is about the main character's journey to kill her lover who is worse than dead because they talked about it in advance that neither of them would want to become that kind of monster. The particular plot elements of this were not very interesting. Some of it was like hearing my aunt give commentary on an episode of Amazing Race that she watched last season. Some of it was just dull because it involved a lot of watching her walking around. And a lot of things came together because the main character just magically is in the right place to meet the absolutely perfectly useful people, sometimes the only people in the world with the specific rare skill she needs... and they just happen to live in the village where her lover grew up?
But the best parts of the book were about the temptation to believe the pretty fantasy instead of making the hard choice and then doing the right thing anyway.
Could these books be better? Absolutely. Could Blood Promise have been improved? Yes. Was it a good example of a YA book where morality is a gray area? yes, yes it was. I thought a lot of this book dragged. But I think some of the draggy bits contain a lot of emotional context. I've been reading a long time, I'm sometimes willing to stipulate as to character emotion if it saves 3 chapters of watching the same thing over and over. But possibly you lose the sense of difficulty in overcoming an addiction by not watching the downward spiral.
I thoroughly enjoyed the ending for what it was, plus my least favorite character is actually not skating through unscathed.
I don't think I really get the premise, but assuming the world works like that, I enjoy the books because they consider some really difficult topics. The topics are held at arms' length by the lens of speculative fiction, so we have main characters with friends who die gruesomely, friends that are tortured, frank discussions of things that are worse than death, and an examination of personal morality in the face of really hard choices.
I think this is the kind of thing that is best served by fiction, where it exposes people to different situations than they would otherwise experience and hopefully the characters' experience in the books will help if there ever is a real life crisis. Parents are always giving advice and saying "You should learn from my mistakes so you don't have to make the same ones yourself." Books are good for seeing someone else's mistakes in dealing with situations too.
I really enjoy seeing the party girl from the first book buckle down and get serious. I liked seeing her cope with her first adult-level peer relationships with sarcasm. I enjoy seeing a young woman's confusion about why she just isn't interested in attractive guys who happen to like her.
I also really enjoy reading how the main character's decision to protect her best friend means they stop being friends because the main character has to keep her own concerns to herself. I don't particularly enjoy how the best friend gets wrapped up in trivialities and takes zero responsibility for any of her decisions, ever. But I know people like that myself.
This book is about the main character's journey to kill her lover who is worse than dead because they talked about it in advance that neither of them would want to become that kind of monster. The particular plot elements of this were not very interesting. Some of it was like hearing my aunt give commentary on an episode of Amazing Race that she watched last season. Some of it was just dull because it involved a lot of watching her walking around. And a lot of things came together because the main character just magically is in the right place to meet the absolutely perfectly useful people, sometimes the only people in the world with the specific rare skill she needs... and they just happen to live in the village where her lover grew up?
But the best parts of the book were about the temptation to believe the pretty fantasy instead of making the hard choice and then doing the right thing anyway.
Could these books be better? Absolutely. Could Blood Promise have been improved? Yes. Was it a good example of a YA book where morality is a gray area? yes, yes it was. I thought a lot of this book dragged. But I think some of the draggy bits contain a lot of emotional context. I've been reading a long time, I'm sometimes willing to stipulate as to character emotion if it saves 3 chapters of watching the same thing over and over. But possibly you lose the sense of difficulty in overcoming an addiction by not watching the downward spiral.
I thoroughly enjoyed the ending for what it was, plus my least favorite character is actually not skating through unscathed.
