By Margo de Klerk
Cynthia’s life changed a lot when she met Nathan and his group of paranormal friends, but now she’s on a solo journey to discover where her future might take her and hopefully uncover some of her past. I’m sure this won’t be a problem for her persistent and too-trusting self. Let’s find out!
Read if you like: YA paranormal, paranormal romance, mysteries, vampires, witches, shifters, the search for purpose, uncovering background info, and transitional books in general.
Cynthia is in Berlin to find herself. She’s tired of being the least useful friend in her group and wants to earn her place in the world. She’s also been getting postcards from her previously non-existent father and the last one came from… Berlin. So, what’s the problem if her trip does double duty. Except, as she looks for clues to locate her father, she begins to uncover a big problem hiding in the Berlin supernatural community. A problem that draws way too much attention to a lone teenaged, shifter far from home.
This book was not what I was expecting, and not in a good way. I really liked Wicked Magic. Nathan, the vampire hunter, as the lead was something different for the YA PNR genre and gave the story an insider perspective. In Wicked Blood, we have Cynthia as the lead and like the first book, she’s more than capable of naïvely leading herself directly into a huge mess. This alone makes the story feel more generic with the poor teen girl trope, despite the fact that she’s supernatural herself. Cynthia is way too trusting and doesn’t have as many skills or the amount of paranormal knowledge as her friends. A fact that she laments constantly throughout the book. I’ll take a realistically whiney teenage protagonist any day, but Cindy… oh Cindy. She’s clueless and she knows it. Yet she keeps taking her incapable self into increasingly dangerous situations after banishing her own internal warnings and thoughts to call her friends. This takes ‘learning the hard way’ to the extreme.
When we do get around to her realizing that she needs to ask people for help, they begin to connect the things she’s uncovered. All the clues eventually point to a storyline which hopefully reunite our Oxford crew as it continues. Maybe they can begin epic quest that would assist in finding inroads into the different paranormal factions like we started in the first book. Overall, this was a transition book and was a little underwhelming. Poor Cynthia is simultaneously too nice and too messy to lead her own series. She ends up nearly in the same spot as before. Meanwhile we had to deal with a convoluted plot that ultimately was filler to get to the endpoint and the potential to keep the quest for knowledge going.
I’m not ready to give up on The Vampire of Oxford yet, but I hope we get back to the team sooner than later.
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