Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn Book Review
From Goodreads: 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 new:
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.
Bree wants to fight, but the Regents who rule the Order won’t let her. To them, she is an unknown girl with unheard-of power, and as the living anchor for the spell that preserves the Legendborn cycle, she must be protected.
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 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.
I was incredibly hyped for this book. Finding out that it was going to be a long wait after that ending in Legendborn was a hard thing to discover, and I was so impatient to get to continue the story. So it was an exciting day when Bloodmarked finally hit the shelves and we could pick up where Deonn left off.
There’s a lot of things I love about this book. Bree is as amazing as ever, and I loved getting to see her build more connections with her friends and get to learn more about her family history. She’s a great character because she feels so real. She makes reckless decisions that somehow strike the perfect balance for a teenage protagonist. She’s not ridiculously wise beyond her years, and she makes a lot of mistakes, but she also doesn’t do some of the wildly questionable things that some teen characters do in YA novels. It’s a delicate balance, especially as the audience for YA widens and ages up, but I think it hits the mark perfectly.
Also, we get to learn more about Sel in this one. I really enjoyed getting to discover his backstory and seeing this grudging friendship continue to form between him and Bree. Those sections of the novel were definitely some of the most entertaining, and I enjoyed the back and forth and the constant tension between them. It’s a well-written bond, and it’s definitely one that’s making me itch to pick up the next book in the series when it comes out.
Plot-wise is where things deteriorate for me a bit. I loved the high stakes of Legendborn and that discovery that Bree, not Nick, was the vessel for King Arthur was such an incredible plot twist that really shifted the dynamics of the story and everything the reader knew about the world in it. And I know that I’d be sat here complaining if Bree just instantly got a handle on all of her different branches of magic and was ready to save the world two chapters in. But the plot dragged a bit in this one, and overall I came away from it feeling like not much had happened to shift the story forward. It’s a fun read, but it definitely felt like a middle book in a trilogy for long chunks of it, and there was one point where I put it down for several days because I lost interest in what could happen next. This happened right towards the end of the novel, about where the amazing plot twist happened in the previous book, so it felt noticeably bereft as a result.
I am looking forward to the next book in the series. The concept is fantastic, and the characters and world will stick with you long after the last page, but this one felt a little lacklustre in comparison to Legendborn.
Overall, I’m giving Bloodmarked:
It was a fun read, and I’m still hyped for book three, but it dragged in places and it felt like the plot didn’t progress as much as I hoped it would. The characters are amazing, and the tension and high-stakes elements are still firmly in place, so it’ll be interesting to see how it wraps up.
Has anyone else read this book or plans to? What do you think about it? Let me know by joining in the discussion in the comments section down below! <3
