Book Review: Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn

Synopsis:

The shadows have risen, and the line is law.

All Bree wanted was to uncover the truth behind her mother’s death. So she infiltrated the Legendborn Order , a secret society descended from King Arthur’s knights – only to discover her own ancestral power. Now, Bree has become someone

A Medium. A Bloodcrafter. A Scion.

But the ancient war between demons and the Order is rising to a deadly peak. And Nick , the Legendborn boy Bree fell in love with, has been kidnapped.

When the Regents reveal they will do whatever it takes to hide the war, Bree and her friends must go on the run to rescue Nick themselves. But enemies are everywhere, Bree’s own powers are unpredictable and dangerous, and she can’t escape her growing attraction to Selwyn , the mage sworn to protect Nick until death.

If Bree has any hope of saving herself and the people she loves, she must learn to control her powers from the ancestors who wielded them first – without losing herself in the process.

Review:

I went on quite the journey with Bloodmarked. Almost two weeks of reading almost killed my love for this story. This book was slow with a capital ‘S’. With nearly 600 pages and a slow pace, Bloodmarked was a bit of a difficult read for me.

I enjoy these books but I will never understand why the scions of King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable would be based in North America/be American. I can’t remember now if book one mentioned anything about other members being British, but this one at least says Lark is Scottish.

Selwyn “I should kill you for touching her.” Kane, they could never make me hate you. How could I when he’s casually dropping lines like “No other Merlin can protect you like I can, because no other Merlin feels about you the way I do. I want you to live, because I want you to be happy. Not because of a spell, but because so very many things would break and go dark if you weren’t in the world. Myself included.” I said in my review of the first book, almost five years ago now, that I’m very interested in Sel and I thought Nick was a little boring. Bloodmarked has only fortified this opinion.

Bloodmarked got pretty heavy with some of the themes it explored, but I expected that based on what we found out in the first book. I’m not sure if this book has content warnings at the beginning, but I’d suggest looking it up just in case.

There were some funny moments, which definitely helped lighten the tone a little bit. Some of my favourites were:

“Aren’t you the heir to the throne of white dude magic?”
“You get to be as old as I am, Merlin, and the little and big evils start to blur together” This made me laugh, not because it’s a funny thing to say, oh no, it’s funny because he’s only 35.
“Leave it to Selwyn Kane to be comforted by a pile of sharp objects.”
“Alice taps her chin. “So, what percent actual, active evil are you, then?” Sel glares at her. “Don’t try to be clever.” She laughs. “I don’t need to try, fang boy.”

Tracy Deonn is great at dropping absolute scorching one liners: “Since when has a man’s title prevented his brutality instead of further emboldening it?” I hate to agree with one of the ‘bad guys’ but you can’t deny this is a stone cold line. Also completely true.

I feel like we learnt a lot but then also not much happened in Bloodmarked. This is probably because I finished reading the book weeks ago and have only just got around to writing the review, but also because of the amount of time it took me to finish. There’s a lot of lore, including words I couldn’t remember the definition for, that I would have enjoyed more if I read book one and two closer together. I’m definitely going to need to read Oathbound within the next year so I don’t forget what’s going on.