Review: Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake

Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake Hardcover, 316 pages
Published August 30th 2011 by Tor Teen
Goodreads|Amazon

Just your average boy-meets-girl, girl-kills-people story...

Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation: He kills the dead.

So did his father before him, until his gruesome murder 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. Together they follow legends and local lore, trying to keep up with the murderous dead—keeping pesky things like the future and friends at bay.

When they arrive in a new town in search of a ghost the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood, Cas doesn’t expect anything outside of the ordinary: move, 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, but now stained red and dripping 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.

And she, for whatever reason, spares his life.

Ok, the first line of the synopsis is just bad ass, I love the cover, and it has an average rating of 4 stars on Goodreads. This book can’t fail! And it didn’t!

LOVED IT!

first off I want to say I did not read the back of the book, the inside cover, or Goodreads, before I bought this. (I have been doing this for most books lately).  I solely went off the fact that people were saying it was awesome.

This book was a great combination of a creepy love story. Nothing about it really made me think it was terrifying like some people say but there were definitely some suspenseful parts.

This is the first horror book I’ve read.  It was definitely a fun read and I’m so glad I picked it up. The amount of detail the author wrote for the deaths and ghosts was awesome; gory, but not enough to make me want to gag. The first chapter grabbed me immediately and I didn’t want to put down the book.

So let’s talk about some characters.

I really liked Cas (Theseus Casio) who is the main character and who’s point-of-view we see. His mom, Carmel, and Thomas are also really good characters. Their parts were written well and I never once questioned them.  I liked Thomas’s grandfather Morfran, although he was a little weird. I kept getting the feeling that he had ulterior motives or something.  Carmel’s ex-boyfriend Mike and his friends Will and Chase were assholes so I didn’t like them as people. They were the perfect character for that part though. I would have to say my favorite character would definitely have to be Anna. I liked everything about her.

The only bad part was the romance. I didn't get that at all. It was creepy and weird.

The ending was awesome, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

I definitely recommend you pick this up if you haven’t read it yet and I will definitely be buying the second book.

My Rating:

Have you read this? What do you think of it??