|+|This book has graphic gore in it, if this bothers you on any level or could possibly trigger/upset you pass on this book|+|
“But I get the feeling you’re always thinking really hard.” ~Thomas (Anna Dressed in Blood)
Genre: YA Horror/Romance
Summary: Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation: He kills the dead.
So did his father before him, until he was gruesomely murdered by a ghost he sought to kill. Now, armed with his father’s mysterious and deadly athame, Cas travels the country with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat. They follow legends and local lore, destroy the murderous dead, and keep pesky things like the future and friends at bay.
Searching for a ghost the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood, Cas expects the usual: track, hunt, kill. What he finds instead is a girl entangled in curses and rage, a ghost like he’s never faced before. She still wears the dress she wore on the day of her brutal murder in 1958: once white, now stained red and dripping with blood. Since her death, Anna has killed any and every person who has dared to step into the deserted Victorian she used to call home.
Yet she spares Cas’s life.
My Humble Opinion: Not gonna lie the reason I got this book is because one of the key characters has my name. Also it’s about ghosts. And it’s considered a pretty scary book. Dibs. My expectations were high for this book and unfortunately the book fell short of them in a number of areas. But I’m so glad I kept reading until the end. The ending made the rest of the book worth it and gave me enough confidence in the author to want to read the sequel.
Anna Dressed in Blood is interesting for a number of reasons, I think the biggest one being the way the author played with tropes. You have the cooler than ice popular girl, the total geek who only is noticed when he’s being too weird, and then you have Cas, our hero, a lone wolf who’s trying his best not to make any friends or draw any attention to himself, and honestly, who needs ‘em? He does very much so once he meets the violent ghost Anna.
Cas’ character development was painfully slow. Frankly I felt much more of a connection to Caramel (the cool girl) and Thomas (the geek) than I did to Cas. Cas really didn’t grow on me until the very end. And I mean the last four chapters very end. This was a major issue for me because Cas is not only the star of the show, he’s also our narrator.
I felt that at times the author used this as an excuse for jumpy transitions. Things would happen quickly for Cas and so he would just skip things and it caused me major confusion. Towards the start of the book I found myself having to re-read a lot, only to find that I didn’t miss anything, the transition scene was completely missing. Interestingly enough although the pace of the story quickens towards the end, the transitions get much better. It’s almost as if the writing improved as the book went on.
The reason Caramel was such a cool girl to the rest of the school is because she didn’t let her status define her. She actually cared about people and that coupled with her natural charisma made her really awesome. I lit up every time she surprised Cas which was often. Thomas was so relatable was because he was so far from normal, but he still was a good friend. He never let society’s views of him stop him from being a kind person and often a voice of reason. He really comes into his own towards the end.
Anna was a really unique take on violent ghosts and sadly I can’t say much about why she’s one of my favorites and why she helped carry the book for me without getting into spoilers. Just trust me when I say that she’s awesome. Although most scenes with Anna involved gore. None of this gore stuck with me (just like the romance felt really left field to me until the very end). I felt like it was gore to try to scare the reader, but instead it just grossed me out and made me go “meh, ok, whatever.” Frankly the horror element of the story was a huge letdown. It just wasn’t there for me. Gore =/= horror.
TL;DR: If you don’t mind a good amount of gore and enjoy character driven books then you might want to give this book a go. It’s a fun read and despite the faulty transitions, the hard to love/get behind Cas, and the gore for horror, this is a really character driven book and I enjoyed that. Each character does come into their own. And nearly everyone gets a turn saving someone in a way that was completely true to them. That was really neat because it meant that no character was stuck in a stereotype or trope, they expanded beyond that, beyond the first judgements of Cas and the reader. Although this book by no means blew me away, it was enjoyable enough for me to want to pick up the sequel. I trust the author to do some really awesome stuff with these characters in the future, seeing as this book got better as it progressed.
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