Elliott's Reviews > Daughter of the Blood

This book is incredibly awful. It's embarrassingly bad. The characters (with their ridiculous names) and the world are poorly developed. The author gives us variations of the same scenes again and again - Daemon is a sexy threat, dear old dad Saetan is old and tenderhearted, Jaenelle is very powerful and young, everyone else is amazed and afraid and/or 110% evil, full stop, no nuance. The plot? Languishes.

I never had a sense of where different "realms" existed in relation to one another, for all of the babbling about "webs" and "gates" -- honestly, as far as I can tell, each "realm" is like a city, and they all sort of float around in space and some of them are in Hell, where everyone's undead and they only drink blood, not liquor, except sometimes when they get totally wasted, also a horse vampire. ??? Some people can use magic, and some people are better at it or born with more power, but it's not really explained what the difference is, except that everyone we're concerned with is a) able to use magic, b) quite powerful or at least sort of special, and c) totally sexy. I mean, forget about any kind of description beyond "gold eyes" and "long black nails," all you're going to get is how handsome and attractive and slinky and attractive and scary Daemon is, and Saetan has a bad leg, and Lucivar has wings. Maybe bat wings? Not sure. Plus Jaenelle has blonde hair, which she fluffs all the day, and blue eyes, but sometimes she has a stupid expression, and sometimes she's totally intense and wise beyond her years. Everyone who's bad is fat or doesn't have an impressive bosom or whatever, and they're always hanging out in shadows cackling about their wicked schemes and drinking blood. I'm not even kidding. This book is a joke.

Daemon's always angry in a cold way, so he's always leaving frost where he goes. However, when he really gets his dander up, he's able to grotesquely torture and mutilate the people who are supposed to have control over him, so like... why does he allow them to boss him around and make him so miserable in the first place? Everyone's super passive-aggressive, like, I know you're awful and you're going to make me even more wretched, but I think I'll wait until you do and then I guess I'll retaliate. But until then I'm just going to be very sad and dark and call myself a whore and slink around being bitter and cold and sometimes putting on one earring and makeup.

And all of that would be fine, if the author seemed at all in on the joke, but the narrative takes itself so seriously. Every page is absolutely dripping with melodrama. YOU'VE COLLECTED ALL OF THE GEMS IN EVERY REALM? HOLY THUNDER CATS, BATMAN, NO ONE THOUGHT IT WAS POSSIBLE!! (hands trembling uncontrollably)

The most egregious element of this book, I think, is the author's use of sexual violence, abuse, slavery, and torture, just to write some kinky stuff and give her characters something to whine about. Everything fades to black or gets kind of hazy and abstract whenever something serious is going down, and honestly, instead of leaving it to the reader's imagination, I think it would have done the author some good to actually write the minutiae of the torment she piles onto her characters. By skipping the details, not only does Bishop not have to really confront the depravity she's imagined for us, she also doesn't have to deal with how unrealistic and bizarre so many things are.

Furthermore, as several people have pointed out, Daemon is totally sexually attracted to Jaenelle, who's twelve. And I think this is supposed to be not only acceptable but ROMANTIC, because he really loves her, like her SOUL, not just her BODY you guys. Kartane, who spends a lot of time thinking about how he's going to brutally rape young girls so that their lives are ruined, is a cartoon. This book isn't real, so he can think whatever Bishop wants. But Daemon justifies his attraction and repeatedly puts himself in a position to take advantage of Jaenelle in ways that he can justify ... which is not romantic, it's terrifying. Pretty much the last scene in the book is Jaenelle accusing Daemon of being like everyone else who just wants her body, so, to save her, he... uses his magical "seduction tendrils" to trick her into doing what he wants by destroying her willpower. If the book was like, yo that's pretty devastating, maybe this guy is not actually cool and a hero, maybe sometimes the bad guy really believes that he cares about you as he's destroying you - so we're going to deal with that by holding him accountable for his actions, that would be a neat twist that gave the story some kind of actual consequential meaning. But no, he just did that because he loved her so much omg!! Isn't he handsome and charming and tragic.

Also, if you thought that the matriarchal society was going to have anything to do with competent, awesome ladies, forget that noise. It's full of stereotypically catty and vain caricatures, the author uses their sexual aggressiveness to paint them as villains, and one of the most common cusses is "son of a whoring bitch." This book is awful.

There are so many problems that I could just keep going and going, but all I'm going to do is keep complaining about this disgusting, stupid book. I think a really serious editor could have been like hey lady this is a nice private fantasy but let's buckle down and write a challenging, compelling, and creative piece of literature, and this might have turned into something pretty interesting and powerful, but obviously that did not happen.