Review: Strong, spunky female lead fighting against the worst of humanity!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 02 10, 2014
Disclaimer: I received a copy to read and review. No compensation was received or offered. The following is my honest opinion after having read this novel.~TKHI have been a fan of Katie Salidas's work since I first cracked open her IMMORTALIS. I jumped at the chance to read an ARC of Dissension and was NOT disappointed at all. Bleaker and grittier than the Immortalis series, you can't really compare the two other than to say both have vampires in it. It's an entirely different setting with an entirely different set of rules and happenings.Set in the future, vampires revealed themselves in order to help humanity survive so that they could continue taking mouthfuls of blood from the humans to survive themselves. Once human society was re-established, the humans, true to nature, turned on the vampires and enslaved them, conveniently forgetting that had it not been for the vampires, they the humans would not be here in the first place after the cataclysm.Despite it being the future, human society has regressed to the days of vicious bloodshed for entertainment and the keeping (and torturing) of slaves. While in today's modern society you could argue that we, too, have the same thirst for blood as proven by the popularity of MMA cage fights, none of those combatants are slaves and no fight is to the death. Mira's world as a vampire gladiator is bloody, torturous, and kill or be killed. She lives off rations of tiny vials of rat blood unless she wins a match and can take a mouthful of blood from her opponent before she kills him/her. Author Katie Salidas's descriptions of the hordes of humans glorifying these deathmatches is apt and horrific. The more I learned about this future human society and the enslaved vampires, the more I cringed at the descriptions, recognizing that Salidas has captured the very worst of humans and showcases it well. The complete disregard for the well-being of other living creatures, the gluttony and greed for power and money, the desire to inflict pain on others simply because they can...truly horrifying and disgusting especially as I can envision this future so easily because of how our society currently treats one another and those at our mercy, such as animals.Mira is aggressive, fights against the establishment, refuses to be "play nice" with her captors unlike some of the other vampires, and really, who could blame her? She is abrasive against the humans and, as the reader, I found myself cheering her on. I wanted her and the vamps to rise up against their owners and humble them!This was a kindle bruiser for me; I gobbled it up in one sitting and cannot wait to see what happens in the next installment. Will Mira & Lucian change the world?