Flesh and Blood by Willow Rose is the start of a YA vampire series. Robyn’s parents always favor her older brother, and the favoritism has been getting worse as her brother is about to go away to college. She just wants to be able to spend time with her best friend Jayden, but her mom is threatening to take her out of her school if they are caught hanging out together again. Soon, her older brother Adrian starts to display some strange behaviors, and people start to get hurt around the town. Robyn’s parents don’t see anything wrong with what Adrian is doing, but Robyn knows something is wrong, and she is determined to get to the bottom of it with Jayden’s help.
I was really looking forward to a good YA vampire novel, like the ones from the early 2000s, but this one was just disappointing. For starters, these characters acted far below their ages. I had to constantly remind myself that Robyn was supposed to be 16 years old, most of the time she read like she was 13 or even maybe younger than that. She wasn’t even smart about half of the stuff she does! At one point, even though her mother had told her not to have Jayden around, she had him sneak into her room? That’s like….literally the easiest way to get caught. There were so many things they could have done to avoid getting caught together, but it’s like they didn’t even know how to do basic things. If you can’t text the person, use a messaging app on your computer or something. If your mom only sends you to school and home, you could just meet up secretly at school. So many opportunities wasted, and I was just shocked that they couldn’t think of a single good idea of how to meet up. And their little “arguments” made me so mad, like they bickered like 8-year-olds in the middle of an important investigation that involved both of their brothers. It was honestly just so funny that I couldn’t take the story seriously.
Getting back to the brothers, I couldn’t understand the parents at all. They want to keep their daughter locked up, but they literally don’t care about the other kid getting hurt, caught, or possibly doing something to hurt someone else. I will get more in-depth with this in my review of book 2, but I couldn’t skip over how ridiculous the situation was. If their parents really had a secret to hide, why wouldn’t they hide one kid and then not even take precautions for the other. That’s putting a lot of trust in the other kid, which doesn’t make sense given how off the kid had been acting most of the time in the book.
Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this book. I am halfway through book 2 as I am writing this review, so I am going to finish the trilogy, and my opinion hasn’t improved any. Definitely skip this trilogy!
Overall Rating: 1 out of 5 books
