My Love Lies Bleeding by Alyxandra Harvey

My Love Lies Bleeding by Alyxandra Harvey
Buy My Love Lies Bleeding by Alyxandra Harvey at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Teens
Reviewer: Loralei Haylock
Summary: Another book heralded as a 'must' for Twilight fans. There are some really good ideas, but the great bits are overshadowed by the author rushing to get to the romance.
Buy? Maybe	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 256	Date: January 2010
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing plc
ISBN: 978-1408803400
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Solange Drake hates being the only born female vampire. Not only does she have to put up with her pheromones making her irresistible to male vampires, who all want to use her to start their own vampire families, she has a prophecy looming over her head, one that states a female Drake vampire will overthrow the current ruler to become Queen of the Vampires.

Solange has no desire to take over from current Queen, Natasha, but it seems that only her family, and her human best friend, Lucy, knows that. With her sixteenth birthday, and the bloodchange that will make her full Vampire (or kill her) rapidly approaching, Solange has enough on her plate without worrying about Queen Natasha trying to kill her.

Lucy has been best friends with Solange since forever, practically living at the Drake house. As a consequence she is practically immune to Vampire pheromones. So why is Solange's older brother Nicholas suddenly really attractive, when all her life Lucy's found him annoying?

When an agent from the Helios-Ra, a human agency out to kill Vampires, tries to kill Solange, a chain of events sends the Drakes and Lucy on a dangerous path to keep Solange alive long enough to go through the bloodchange that might just kill her anyway…

Yes, here we go again. Another book heralded as a must for Stephenie Meyer fans. It seems that all commissioning editors see the words 'vegetarian vampire', 'teenage girl narrator' and 'romance' and snap up the book, hoping they've hit the next jackpot in the lucrative 'fangirl' market.

If only everyone would stop trying to write the next Twilight and actually write their own book. Which is pretty much exactly where My Love Lies Bleeding goes wrong.

There are some really great bits in this book – the Vampire Politics are obviously extensively imagined and plotted out, the almost scientific approach to the Mythology is an interesting and different angle on the world of Vampires, particularly the dangerous bloodchange part, where becoming a Vampire will make you immortal, but could kill you. The secret agency, the Helios-Ra, made interesting adversaries, and the twisting turning plot of betrayal and intrigue could have made for gripping reading. If only it had been explored.

The whole book felt like Harvey was in such a rush to get to the (rather banal) romance, that she skipped over everything that made her book interesting. It was only a short little book, that could have been expanded into something much richer and deeper, going beyond teenage romance with the undead to a more epic fantasy.

My thanks to the publishers for sending a copy.

If you're after supernatural romance, try Rachel Caine or mother-daughter team P C and Kristin Cast. But if you want to read the sort of book this could have been, try Julia Golding's excellent Dragonfly, or Fire by Kristin Cashore.

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