Age Group: Young Adult
Genre: Paranormal
Release Date: March 11, 2014
Buy Links:
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Book Description:
Lips red as rubies, hair dark as night. Drink your true love's blood, become the Vampire, Snow White."
EVERY THOUSAND YEARS THE VAMPIRE QUEEN SELECTS A NEW BODY, ALWAYS THE FAIREST IN THE LAND, AND THIS TIME SHE'S CHOSEN SNOW WHITE.
Snow White lives in Salem, Massachusetts with her dad, stepmother, and her cat, Gatsby. Her entire life she's been teased for her fairy tale name, and the fact that her seven best friends happen to be guys whose names begin with the same letters as the seven dwarves.
Everything changes two months before her sixteenth birthday. She's bitten by The Hunter, and transformed into a revenant—not quite human, not quite vampire.
"Blood and Snow" by RaShelle Workman can be
described as a "fractured fairy tale". A lot of the characters the
story deals with have names that we might all be familiar with such as Snow
White, Charming, and Ariel, but the characters aren't the Disney-fied versions
that we've come to know and love. Instead, this is a story that deals with the
modern day, and our main character is Snow White and she's turning into a
vampire. That's right, pure-as-the-driven-snow Snow White is becoming one of
those evil monster things that we're taught to fear.
Snow's dilemma is because the Vampire Queen of a magical
realm has chosen her to be the next body she takes over (that's how she stays
young and powerful forever), and Snow and her friends must find a way to defeat
the Queen and learn to deal with the new changes happening to Snow.
It took me awhile to get into the story. It began with
mostly describing who Snow White is, what her life is like, her relationship
with her seven best friends (who all happen to be the boys who live next door
to her), and there's not much that hooks the reader in right away. However,
once the action got started, I was able to find myself more invested in Snow's
story, and wanted to keep reading.
"Blood and Snow's" plot was a good one. There were
defined stakes on the line, and even some twists and turns thrown in along the
way to keep things interesting. However, the romantic subplots didn't always
flow so smoothly for me. Throughout the story, there's a lot of mentions of
"Snow White's true love" (as there is with any fairy tale), and Snow
goes back and forth between a few guys for the majority of the story, and then
when her true love is revealed, it seems like it's happened out of nowhere.
Once the reveal was getting a bit closer, I had my suspicions, but there wasn't
much build up between the two of them. I would have liked to see a bit more
interaction between them, instead of her true love just being a guy who was in
the background for most of the time.
One thing that was weird about "Blood and Snow" is
that it isn't one cohesive book. Instead, Workman wrote it as a series of short
novellas that tell the story. This threw me off while reading, because I didn't
understand the motivation to split it up that way. Since I was reading it all
the way through, it just seemed like they were chapter breaks since each
novella isn't a stand alone story, and they are all part of the bigger whole.
All in all, I did enjoy reading "Blood and Snow",
and not just because I always seem to be drawn to anything that has to do with
fairy tales (well, maybe a little of that motivation was there). It was a fun
story once it picked up its pace, and even though it's not a "must
read", it may be something you might want to check out for yourself.
RaShelle Workman is the author of the popular Blood and Snow series. She loves to reinvent fairy tales that older teens and adults can sink their teeth into. Her stories include kissing, vampires, werewolves, witches, aliens, and more kissing. Sleeping Roses, Exiled, Beguiled, and Dovetailed have foreign rights contracts with a Turkish publisher. RaShelle is also one of the co-founders of Indie Recon LIVE, a self publishing conference that will debut October 10-11, 2014 in Sandy, Utah.
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