Review: Blood Rights (Kristen Painter)

Blood Rights by Kristen Painter

Publisher: Orbit (2011)
Format: Mass Market Paperback | 392 pages
Genre(s): Urban Fantasy, Paranormal Romance

Description (GR): "The lacy gold mapped her entire body. A finely-wrought filigree of stars, vines, flowers, butterflies, ancient symbols and words ran from her feet, up her legs, over her narrow waist, spanned her chest and finished down her arms to the tips of her fingers.

Born into a life of secrets and service, Chrysabelle’s body bears the telltale marks of a comarré—a special race of humans bred to feed vampire nobility. When her patron is murdered, she becomes the prime suspect, which sends her running into the mortal world…and into the arms of Malkolm, an outcast vampire cursed to kill every being from whom he drinks.

Now Chrysabelle and Malkolm must work together to stop a plot to merge the mortal and supernatural worlds. If they fail, a chaos unlike anything anyone has ever seen will threaten to reign."

This one was another impulse buy of sorts. Vampires in a fantasy (not urban) setting intrigued me enough to want to read this.

I think I kind of misunderstood, because this is not classic fantasy; it's urban fantasy. In a way it's not even urban fantasy; it's paranormal romance.

Near future. There is a world hidden from humans by several covenants made hundreds of years ago by powerful forces. These magical contracts protects humans and 'othernaturals' alike making sure vampires, shape shifters and fae remain hidden from the general population. Vampires live in hidden cities and feed on willing humans and comarré - a race specifically bred to provide vampires with pure, powerful blood.

Chrysabelle is a comarré, one of the most expensive of her kind. When her vampire patron is killed she is forced to flee the hidden city and hide in Paradise City (USA, New Florida) because everyone thinks her guilty of murder. Plus she seems to have acquired a vampire relic (ring) by pure mistake. So she has to run and predictably ends up with a cursed vampire, a ghost that is not really a ghost and yet another cursed shape shifter.

Blood Rights' strong point is the world building. Even if it's not fantasy after all, I liked the idea of comarré, the origins of the othernaturals and the covenants. On the other hand, I didn't like the characters or the story that much.

The story because it was simplistic. The author uses very common plot devices like the kidnapping of a loved one and the reckless rescue. She did take the time to develop other storylines that will probably be important latter, but the main story of this book... was not very interesting. Painter was more interested in describing all the attraction between the two main characters.

Now, for the characters. They weren't horrible, they were just... not interesting (again). Mal was suitably tortured and Chrysabelle was suitably defiant; and most of the time they only thought of how attracted they were to each other. These two protagonists were wrong for this story somehow... they are definitely paranormal romance characters and it felt weird to have them in a book that is not so much character as plot driven (or it should have been, if the world building is any indication). Also, I didn't really connect to them, didn't care much for any of the characters since they were so stereotypical and sometimes even a bit annoying. Fi and Doc, the sidekicks are barely worth mentioning because they were very one-dimensional.

So, overall, Blood Rights has great world-building and a good enough concept but the story and the characters were so average they kind of ruined the book. I find that I'm not very interested in the rest of the story since I couldn't really connect with the characters. A standard urban fantasy book, nothing special.

View all my reviews