I picked up a free Amazon copy of Kelly St. Clare‘s Blood Trial about this time last year. (Actually, a year ago tomorrow. LOL) Then I purchased Vampire Debt and Death Game in order to finish the series. I read them all back to back. So, I think I’ll just write a single review for the series, instead of for each individual book. But here is the blurb for book one, to give you an idea of what the series is about.
The dice are rolled at midnight.
As the twenty-one-year-old heiress to the Le Spyre fortune, my life should consist of strawberry mojitos and golf carts.
Right? But I’m determined to forge my own path. Desperate to escape the meaningless games of the rich, I flee my family’s estate.
Secret alias—check.
Place to sleep—uh, kind of?
Job—crap!
I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, but that’s the least of my worries. My city is a giant board game. The players are supernatural— freakin’ vampires—including an overbearing crown prince whose unwanted attention could spell my demise.
Now, I must play their deadly game, or my grandmother and best friend will pay the ultimate price.
As I said, I purchased and read all three books (well, the first was a freebie). So, I can’t claim I didn’t enjoy the series. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have continued. But this is one of those series that I enjoyed on the surface. I liked the characters. There’s some humor. The writing is engaging. The female main character had a backbone of steel and a sharp wit. The male romantic lead was forced to grovel in a satisfying manner, and I liked how he let his heroine lead in so many situations. I was invested in their outcome. I enjoyed it…so long as I didn’t think too deeply about it.
Because there just isn’t any getting around the fact that the hero owned slaves, saw nothing wrong with owning slaves, and had not changed his opinion about owning slaves by the end of the book. It gets awfully hard to keep the ‘romantic’ in the ‘romantic male lead’ in such cases.
Similarly, there just isn’t any way to ignore the fact that (as is so often the case in romance books), by the end, he had gotten everything he wanted without sacrificing anything for it. While she had to go through hell and willing give up almost everything she valued in order to earn her man. Why are women so often expected to suffer for love while men just have to exist?
And lastly, there’s just something a little classist and elitist about the way she was made out to be so exceptional because she grew up wealthy and was, therefore, trained to be more. Sure, she avoided her wealthy friends’ snobbish fate because she had and valued a poor friend. But the whole thing was just icky.
All in all, as I said in the beginning, this is a fun (if slow) series, so long as you don’t think past the surface plot.
Other Reviews:
https://pastmidnight.home.blog/2020/01/30/mini-reviews-vampire-towers-series-by-kelly-st-clare/