Friday, October 25, 2013

47. The Book of Blood and Shadow - Robin Wasserman

2012 Knopf Books for Young Readers
450 pgs.
YA Fantasy (but mostly CRF)
Finished: 10/13/2013
Goodreads Rating:  3.61
My Rating:  Liked it (3) 
Acquired: TPPL
Setting: Contemporary college town New England and contemporary Prague
1st sentence/s:  "I should probably start with the blood."

My comments:  I really liked the first part of this story, but it got more and more convoluted and complicated once the teenagers went to Prague. Relationships were explored nicely until Nora and Max were identified as a couple...and that's the problem. Their whole relationship was only identified, never really fleshed out, never SHOWN, only told about.  It wasn't believable, though most of the rest of them were.  Much of the book was letters written 400 years ago in Latin, translated by the protagonist.  She was able to glean a lot of information without giving enough clues to the reader.  It was just too sketchy in a lot of places, and left me with a ...what???.... feeling.

Goodreads Review:  It was like a nightmare, but there was no waking up. When the night began, Nora had two best friends and an embarrassingly storybook one true love. When it ended, she had nothing but blood on her hands and an echoing scream that stopped only when the tranquilizers pierced her veins and left her in the merciful dark. 

But the next morning, it was all still true: Chris was dead. His girlfriend Adriane, Nora’s best friend, was catatonic. And Max, Nora’s sweet, smart, soft-spoken Prince Charming, was gone. He was also—according to the police, according to her parents, according to everyone—a murderer.

Desperate to prove his innocence, Nora follows the trail of blood, no matter where it leads. It ultimately brings her to the ancient streets of Prague, where she is drawn into a dark web of secret societies and shadowy conspirators, all driven by a mad desire to possess something that might not even exist. For buried in a centuries-old manuscript is the secret to ultimate knowledge and communion with the divine; it is said that he who controls the Lumen Dei controls the world. Unbeknownst to her, Nora now holds the crucial key to unlocking its secrets. Her night of blood is just one piece in a puzzle that spans continents and centuries. Solving it may be the only way she can save her own life.

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