Blood Song (Blood Singer #1) by Cat Adams

Released: June 8, 2010
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 368
Publisher: Tor

Source: Personal shelf

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It’s been a while since I’ve read anything by the writing duo of C. T. Adams and Cathy Clamp, who have adopted the pseudonym Cat Adams for some of their newer work. I really enjoyed the two Thrall books that I’ve read so far (you can read my thoughts on the first one here) and I was pretty excited to see Blood Song and its sequel Siren Song available on that glorious bookcloseouts.ca sale I’ve been mentioning in the past couple posts.

One of the things I like about their writing style is that they aren’t afraid to get gritty. They beat up and challenge their characters in all sorts of ways, and not just their protagonist. In this one, though, most of the abuse is centered on Celie. She has to deal with physical and emotional trauma, which makes for a nice, meaty story.

Perhaps my favourite thing about this novel, at least in this particular moment, is how we’re getting sort of an origin story for Celie, in the vein of all those great comic book heroes. At the start of Blood Song, Celie’s a regular human with skillz (yeah, I had to use the “z” there for dramatic effect) but then she wakes up as an Abomination, with who knows what kind of powers. This lets the readers and Celie discover her abilities together and, as a result, we get to see just how it feels to wake up and discover your whole world has changed and there’s nothing you can do about it but kick some serious butt. Plus there are layers in the story that get peeled back as we meet more characters and learn more about their motivations, which made the book quite the page turner.

I promised myself I wouldn’t start Siren Song until I finished writing about Blood Song and so now I’m going to cheat and make this a shorter review, so that I can get to it that much sooner. Trust me, it’s a satisfying read with some action and excellent plotting. I’m sure I’ll have a report on Siren Song for you soon!