Blood and Light (The Blood and Light Vampire Series, #1) by Rue Volley

Review by Jessika

Okay?? So I read Blood and Light by Rue Volley. I want to first say that the concept of the piece was very good. It was pretty original and had the ability to really suck the reader into the story. Unfortunately, the writing itself was very disappointing for me. It was like it was written straight through with little to no editing at all. I mean, how do you stumble when you are already sitting down? Typos and grammar errors were all over the place. Phrases like “I swear”, “he/she looked at”, “ummm” and “Truth is” were repeated over and over again until I started skipping the sections where they were used. The dialogue was dry and very hard to get through most of the time because of all of the stops and breaks. There are much easier and effective ways to convey awkwardness without having the characters trail off after almost every word It was just not needed.

The character names were very close together like Sophie and Sophia. It got pretty confusing sometimes which took me out of the story. The author, who named the main character, Rue Volley, after herself, started to tell the story in first person point of view. That’s fine, unless the character whose point of view it is, is knocked out and somehow she still knows what’s going on and can keep telling the story while unconscious. The whole point of telling a story in first person is because the character doesn’t know everything that’s happening. The reader should be just as much in the dark as the main character. That is why there is no such thing as first person omniscient. Also, the story, although told in a newly discovered point of view, switched from first person to third person to tell about other characters in other locations. Why not leave everything third person? The first person was written like third anyway just using I instead of Rue. On top of that, the author kept switching from present tense to past tense even within the same sentences. Not cool. Not cool.

It mentioned something in the about author paragraph that Volley didn’t go to college and that she was turned into a vampire or something and could write forever. I understand that the author has a sense of humor, but, after reading through that book, I thought that it was better to be a bit more serious in her bio. (Unless she really is a vampire by which I would say, the book was awesome!) But you don’t need college to fix most of the problems this book had. The idea was great! The execution wasn’t. But that can be fixed with more editing. I would suggest hiring a beta reader or two. You could also take the book to a writer’s group and have them tear it apart for you. We writers are hardly ever good editors of our own work. I’m sorry if this review isn’t what you wanted, but I’d be happy to read it again with all the issues fixed.

1/5 for a great plot idea.

To get your copy of Blood and Light (The Blood and Light Vampire Series, #1) please check out the following Amazon links:

UK: Blood and Light (The Blood and Light Vampire Series)

USA: Blood & Light