Bloodfire
(Blood Destiny #1)
By Helen Harper
Length: 9 hours and 6 minutes
Narrator: Saskia Maarleveld
Mack might be, to all intents and purposes, a normal looking human, but she lives with a pack of shapeshifters in Cornwall in rural England after being dumped there by her mother when she was just a young child. She desperately wants to be accepted by her surrogate family, not least because a lot of them hate her for merely being human, but for some reason her blood just won't allow the transformation to occur.With a terrible temper to match her fiery red hair, Mack is extraordinarily useful in a fight, and when her pack alpha is brutally and abruptly murdered, she swears vengeance. Unfortunately, his murder also draws in the Brethren - the leaders of the shapeshifter world - who will slaughter everyone in Mack's small rural pack if they discover her true identity. Unfortunately Corrigan, the green-eyed muscle-bound Lord Alpha of the Brethren, doesn't let much slip by him...
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My Review:
* Beware this review turned more into a rant about the book than an actual review.
This book and I go way back. When I say "way back" I actually mean over 3 years. I started on the audio book over 4 times in those 3 years. I'm sure I read the first 4 hours of this book multiple times before because I kept getting déjà vu. Every time I restarted it I would let it go on a little longer until something much better came along and I forgot about it.
Onto what made this book infuriating: Mack, the heroine. I don't think I've ever hated a character this much in all my years of reading. There were multiple occasions where I was rooting for her to be discovered and killed. She was a hotheaded dumb*ss who didn't have an ounce of self-preservation but everything she ever did went back to keeping her pack safe. And by safe I mean her putting her nose where it didn't belong and bringing more attention to herself in front of the Lord Alpha and consequently putting her and the pack in even more danger. If that's how she protects those she loves I don't want to be a part of her family, ever.
I think the author wanted Corrigan to be this mysterious and hot-tempered guy to "match" Mack. All that ended up doing was making him as unbearable to read about as Mack. He was supposed to be this all-powerful werewolf but he still didn't figure out Mack's very obvious secret and would make exceptions for her whenever he saw fit. The audio book narration also made him sound like an old man with a stuffed nose, the visual that gave me was enough for me to run the other way regardless.
The overall pack dynamic was okay. It wasn't all that interesting to read about and there wasn't much else going on aside from the murder investigation and Mack's poorly kept secret. The characters felt one dimensional and nothing had any depth to it.
I can assure you that I finished this book out of spite. I just couldn't let it win, though I'm not sure if I got anything from finishing it. At least now I can say that I don't like plain urban fantasy. I have to have at least an inkling of romance for me to enjoy a book. There have been exceptions in the past but those books had amazing storylines and likable characters. On a positive note, the book covers for this series are amazing!
The Audio Book:
I disliked this narration SO much. The audio was fuzzy and I can assure you it wasn't my headphones (because these are new and I didn't have a problem with audio in anything else other than this book). The voices weren't very distinguishable for each character. By the last hour, I was barely listening because I was just trying to get this over with. I would not recommend this narrator or this book.
The Rating:
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