Review: Wow...
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 10 1, 2013
I received Oaths of Blood in exchange for a fair and honest review.I honestly needed some recovery time before I started this review. A lot happened in Oaths of Blood. My biggest challenge is going to be conveying exactly how intense this book was without giving anything away. *sigh*The POV for Oaths of Blood switches, just like it did in Sacrificed in Shadow. I like getting into more than one character's head. This time we spent a lot of time with Seth and we were given a glimpse of his past with Rylie. Their history is heartbreaking. Seth has a lot going on in Oaths of Blood. He feels a loyalty toward the pack, but being around Rylie and his brother is tearing him apart. There's more to his history than just his past with Rylie though and he has no idea where any of it will lead.Elise is torn in Oaths of Blood too. She's being framed for a murder she didn't commit, but the evidence is hard to argue with. James is playing with her in more ways than one and in a lot of ways, even though she's surrounded by people, she's more alone than ever. She's distanced herself for a lot of reasons and I think I felt for her more in this book than in the first.There's a lot of action, humor and heartbreak in Oaths of Blood. True to all of S.M. Reine's books though, it is a character driven story. These characters make you `feel' more than any I've read in a while. Those emotions run rampant throughout the entire book. We learn a lot about all the characters that we probably realized before, but not to the extent that they're revealed in this book. One of the things that I like most about this author is that she holds nothing back. Whether it's the vivid descriptions (some beautiful and some gruesome), raw emotions or character angst, the reader experiences it all - whether they're ready for it or not.Another thing that I like about S.M. Reine is that she doesn't make readers wait long between books. The next book in the Ascension series, Ruled by Steel, is due to be released by the end of this month. That's good because the end of this book pretty much did me in. I need to know what happens next. By the end of Oaths of Blood I honestly didn't know which character I felt more for emotionally. Some of those feelings were totally unexpected and I felt myself feeling bad for characters that I never expected to. Well, maybe just a little. When you finish a book and immediately want to simultaneously scream at the author for what they just did to the characters and praise them for creating characters that you care about that much you know that it was a book well worth the time and emotion that you invested in it. This was definitely that kind of book.If you haven't read any of S.M. Reine's books yet, I suggest you start from the beginning. Six Moon Summer, the first book in the Seasons of the Moon series (Rylie and Seth's beginning) is currently still FREE at Amazon. If you want to start with Elise and James, you can also pick up books 1-3 in the Descent series for FREE. I'm giving you this advice from experience. Reading the first two books in this series has made me want to go back and pick up where I left off with the rest of their story. I think I'm drawn even more to these books because I've started both the Seasons of the Moon series and the Descent series, but haven't come close to finishing them. You don't have to read the previous series to enjoy Ascension, but I think the back story will add to the experience. I know enough about the characters to be invested in them, but I want to go back and experience it all, from the beginning. My TBR pile just expanded immensely