Blood Magic by Tessa Gratton- Advanced Copy

The Gist

Blood Magic
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Silla has had one of the most traumatic years of her life.  After being the one to find both of her parents dead in the living room, being broken up with by her boyfriend and not being able to focus on the most important thing in her life, the school play.  To top it all off the police have come to the conclusion that her father murdered her mother and then took his own life shortly after, but Silla knows deep down in her heart this is not true and her father was a sweet, innocent man who could hurt no one especially his own wife.
Nick absolutely hates everything about his life and wishes that it would just go away for a while.  His mother is out of the picture and his father has found a new wife and not one that Nick is fond of.  His father and new stepmother also decide that it is time to move and so Nick packs up, leaves every single one of his friends that it took him so long to make and leaves.
Nick is positive that this is going to be the worst year of his entire life...that is until a trip to the local cemetery finds him talking to Silla and falling in love from the minute he sees her.  Not to mention the fact that right before he walked over she had been slitting her wrists over a dead leaf.  The minute Silla leaves Nick tries to find out everything about her from his only friend in the school and goes on a quest.
That night in the cemetery Silla wasn't slitting her wrists because she was depressed and done with life it is because she was performing magic, and the main ingredient in a spell is blood so, the most logical place in her head is to take it from her wrists, and she wasn't exactly planning on having company in the first place.
As Nick and Silla grow closer to one another they find out that they have more in common than they thought and someone is trying to steal the spell book that they hold so close to them and will literally kill anyone who gets in their way of obtaining the book.

What We Think
Reviewed by The North Star
Number of Pages: 405
We first got this book as an ARC and it was my turn to get the next ARC and I couldn't have been more excited.  I had seen the book cover and short synopsis on Goodreads previously and loved everything about it.  From page one I knew that I was going to really like this book.  I really enjoyed the plot line of the book because it was something different.  Nowadays, the common thing to write about is vampires, werewolves and fallen angels and pure magic has been kind of pushed to the side.  This was also a different type of magic because to perform any spell you had to sacrifice some of your own blood.  I had never heard of this concept and found it really intriguing and it made me want to turn the page at the end of every sentence.  This concept also kept me up in the middle of the night trying to finish one more chapter because I was so desperate to know what was going to happen to the characters.
That brings me to the next topic of characters.  The interesting thing about this book was the fact that it would switch off between three speakers, Silla, Nick and mysterious letters.  Silla was a strong main girl character who I could relate to.  The things that she had to go through in the book I couldn't even imagine holding up as well as she did and I can only imagine crawling up into a little ball and never coming out of my room if I lost my boyfriend and my parents all within the same week.  In that way she was a strong character and clearly new her limits and when enough was enough.  The one thing that did bother me about Silla was that at points she got annoying.  She would complain a little too much about not being able to see Nick because he would turn away to walk home and she would instantly miss him and want him to come back when she was going to see him in a hour or two.  This seemed a little needy but other than that she was a strong character.  Now onto Nick who I liked better than Silla.  Nick was sarcastic  funny and all around a great character.  I couldn't find one thing that I didn't like about him and I was always excited when I saw that a passage of his was coming up.  It seemed like it truly loved Silla and at points she seemed to not trust that they were actually in love but he never doubted his feelings for her and was always there for her if she needed him to be.  Now as a couple the two of them got on my nerves.  They had their moments of "aw" that I thought were cute but most of the time they were just making-out.  I get it if you want to kiss the person, but why does it have to be ALL the time.  When they weren't together they would think about kissing and Silla would only dream of kissing him.  She didn't dream of him as a person all she dreamed of was kissing his soft lips and the second he would leave she would wish they could have kissed once more.  This was also a problem that Nick faced.  When he was alone in his house he would wish Silla was there so he could kiss her and he couldn't wait until he saw her again so that he could kiss her.  Maybe, some people like all the kissing and excessive talk of kissing but I thought it was awkward and only made them weaker characters.   
The last thing I am going to talk about is the cover of the book.  The cover of this book is brillant and whoever designed it I applaud you! It is eye-catching and if I saw it on the shelves in stores I would buy it in an instant and I never get tired of it.  After, reading the book I really appreciated the cover and all of the hidden things that it holds that you don't realize until you read the book.
In the end this was a great read and had fun twists that you don't think will happen and when they do you are completely shock.  This is something I now appreciate about Tessa Gratton as an author and after reading this book I am super excited to read the sequel The Blood Keeper when it comes out! Recommend this book to any YA lover.

Real Teen Rating~ B+ : Wait for Vacation.

Reviewed by ShoreWhisperer
This book was interesting. It was a little slow and confusing in the beginning but altogether a very well put together book.  It was very prominently and Young Adult novel. It has all the elements of it, the dark gothic feel, the attractive guy, the troubled girl. What else could you ask for?  There was a couple of things that bothered me though.
One: as North said they talked WAY to much about kissing... yes Nick is cute and all but please spare me the  gory details of a teenage girls fantasies. It was seriously all they thought about after that first kiss and then its all they did afterwards. I don't think that there was one scene where they didn't end up kissing. Now for a Young Adult novel you can usually get away with that but for some reason it just stuck out like a sore thumb in this book. Nick and Silla just didn't seem the type to makeout all the time.
Two: Nick was way to brooding for my liking. Yes, Edward Cullen is the biggest brooder of all time but when you are somewhat in between not brooding and brooding it just doesn't work. Sometimes I felt like his brooding didn't fit and that he was not realistic at all. He was way to oblivious to his new stepmother and lashed out at her at points that didn't make sense at all and that confused me.
That was what I disliked most about the book. Something that really caught me in this book was the use of symbols. Especially ones that were common in gothic literature in the 1800's. I thought it made the book unique. The crows were very powerful, the cemetery, the old victorian house, the blood and gore. All of it made it seem dark and gothic which is more than some of the "gothic" books you read today give you.
Finally, the old story in the book was fascinating. Most times I don't look forward to reading the older sections of books when they have them, the flashbacks can be tedious to read but the narrator was just so wonderfully evil that it made it fun to read. All the wrongdoings and imperfections in the story was captivating to me and I enjoyed it thoroughly. All the characters were developed wonderfully and everything seemed well done in this book. It was a good read.
Real Teen Rating~B+ : Wait for Vacation.