Audio Book Review: Half-Blood By Jennifer L. Armentrout

Half-Blood
(Covenant #1)
By Jennifer L. Armentrout

Length: 9 hours and 17 minutes
Narrator: Justine Eyre

The Hematoi descend from the unions of gods and mortals, and the children of two Hematoi pure bloods have godlike powers. Children of Hematoi and mortals--well, not so much. Half-bloods only have two options: become trained Sentinels who hunt and kill daimons or become servants in the homes of the pures.

Seventeen-year-old Alexandria would rather risk her life fighting than waste it scrubbing toilets, but she may end up slumming it anyway. There are several rules that students at the Covenant must follow. Alex has problems with them all, but especially rule #1:Relationships between pures and halfs are forbidden. Unfortunately, she's crushing hard on the totally hot pure-blood Aiden. But falling for Aiden isn't her biggest problem--staying alive long enough to graduate the Covenant and become a Sentinel is.

If she fails in her duty, she faces a future worse than death or slavery: being turned into a daimon, and being hunted by Aiden. And that would kind of suck.

Available At:| Amazon | Audible | B&N | Kobo | iBook |

Check Out The Other Books In This Series:

(Linked to my review)

My Review:

I have quite a bit of history with this book. After I read Lux by this author (when it first released) I went looking into her catalog and tried picking up this book. The problem was that I had already read Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy Series. 

Let's address the elephant in the room: Is this a VA copycat? My answer after DNFing this book over 4 times throughout the years and finally finishing it now: No. I'll concede and say that up to the 3 - 4 hour mark in the audio book VA and Half-Blood are very similar in terms of tropes. The thing is no one can copyright tropes. Every story you'll ever read will feature book tropes intermixed with original content. Both these series feature half vampires and full-blooded vampires (pure's) in an academy setting with a heroine who's being put through the wringer after leaving the school behind and having been brought back. And it stops there. Half-Blood goes in a completely different direction after the initial 3 - 4 hours of introduction to the story and characters. That's my two cents on that subject. Now onto what matters: The Story!

Alex has spunk, I'll give her that but her judgment calls are risky at best and life-threatening at worse. I understand that this is a YA novel and that she's 17. I can't expect her to make good decisions 100% of the time. That being said, I still found her decision to go looking to fix a problem alone to be very, very idiotic. I hope she continues to grow up throughout this series and starts making smarter decisions. On a small note, I'd like to say how disappointing the small bits slut-shaming and girl on girl hate for the sake of it throughout this story. We've long since evolved enough as a society to not need this in our lives and especially in our books.

I'm on the fence. I don't necessarily dislike Aiden but I'm also not super impressed by him either. I can say the same thing for Seth. Both have their issues and one is basically being pushed on Alex. They have an interesting dynamic, I'll give them that.

Overall, this was an average story with overall interesting characters and the beginnings of an even better overarching storyline. I'll be giving the next book in this series a try.

The Audio Book:

If you're going to read this DON'T get the audio book. The problem wasn't the narrator because I've listened to other books (even older than this one (2014)) that didn't have this problem. The problem? Well, I think she was working off a busted microphone. Everything was rather muffled and gave me a headache if I listened to it for more than an hour at a time. It was like the microphone noises (vibrations?) were warring with her voice as I was listening. It did not make for a good experience. How this was approved for sale is still beyond me at this point.

My Rating: