Wednesday 4 March 2015

BOOK REVIEW: Half-Blood by Jennifer L. Armentrout

Half-Blood by Jennifer L. Armentrout
#1 The Covenant Series

Genre: Young Adult/Fantasy

My Rating: ★★

Goodreads Page

Goodreads Summary:

The Hematoi descend from the unions of gods and mortals, and the children of two Hematoi pure bloods have godlike powers. Children of Hematoi and mortals--well, not so much. Half-bloods only have two options: become trained Sentinels who hunt and kill daimons or become servants in the homes of the pures. Seventeen-year-old Alexandria would rather risk her life fighting than waste it scrubbing toilets, but she may end up slumming it anyway. There are several rules that students at the Covenant must follow. Alex has problems with them all, but especially rule #1:Relationships between pures and halfs are forbidden. Unfortunately, she's crushing hard on the totally hot pure-blood Aiden. But falling for Aiden isn't her biggest problem--staying alive long enough to graduate the Covenant and become a Sentinel is. If she fails in her duty, she faces a future worse than death or slavery: being turned into a daimon, and being hunted by Aiden. And that would kind of suck.

**Spoiler Free Review**

So I've heard a lot about Jennifer L. Armentrout and her incredible books so I finally decided to pick one up. I know this book often has rather mixed reviews so I was interested in giving it a read. 

I have to say, I certainly wasn't disappointed when it came to reading this book. Her writing style was amazing, enticing, interesting and incredibly fast-paced. It was fantastic to read a book where the writer knows how to write good action scenes in such a well-paced manner. I really liked the Covenant and  the school-like setting, as I always do in these sort of books. I also became pretty attached to the characters. I really loved Caleb and found him very funny throughout the book. I also really did like the main character Alexandria, despite the occasional facepalm moments where you wonder if the character has any common sense at all! 

However, having said that, I only got about forty pages in before seeing the similarities between this and the Vampire Academy series, as many others have also noticed. It does bother me a little bit just how alike they are in terms of plot frame. Half-Bloods, Pures and Daimons were very similar to the three types of Vampires and just the whole set-up between Alexandria and Aiden was almost identical to Dimitri and Rose. 

Having said that a lot of the ideas and chunks of the story are very dissimilar and manage to create an interesting and different plot despite this. I loved the notion of the Greek Gods being behind all of this and the reason these people exist. And I am really eager to continue the series because Jennifer L. Armentrout is a fantastic writer who can make her books so enticing and fun. I've decided to give it four stars because of these reasons and I do think it deserves them. As I said, the fact that it was so similar to The Vampire Academy Series did deter me a bit but I'm happy to continue the series and hopefully the plots will begin to diverge a bit more and it might become a bit more unique. I'm looking forward to finishing this series and I'd highly recommend to at least try this book and see what you feel about it, especially if you like elemental powers (which I really do). 

Although I've not read any more of her books yet I would highly recommend Jennifer L. Armentrout's other books as well. Her writing in this book was brilliant and I've heard her others are even better!

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