I received an advance reader’s copy (ARC) of The Book of Blood and Roses by Annie Summerlee. Since this version is just a proof and not the final version, I won’t quote directly and will keep my comments general.

In The Book of Blood and Roses by Annie Summerlee, Rebecca Charity has been a vampire hunter for four years, ever since vampires murdered her parents and she was recruited by Callisto, an organization determined to seek out and kill vampires. Now, Rebecca is given a new task: to infiltrate Tynahine University, a Scottish uni that has only recently started letting humans attend. Once there, Rebecca must find the long-lost Book of Blood and Roses, which is rumored to contain secrets to vampiric weaknesses and could turn the tide in Callisto’s favor for good. But Tynahine is surprising, as is Rebecca’s vampire roommate Aliz Astra. Aliz is everything Rebecca should hate, a rich girl from a powerful vampire family, and yet she’s also alluring in a way that Rebecca doesn’t want to think about. But a run-in with a couple of vicious classmates leads to Aliz accidentally making Rebecca her familiar, the bond between them to be sealed on the next full moon. The two girls are determined to find a way to stop this, but as they start to seek out answers in the libraries, they grow closer. And Rebecca starts to wonder if she’s been wrong about everything all this time…

This feels like the author took elements of the first Twilight book and made them queer, or took bits from Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil and stuck them in university. And honestly, I should have liked this book; I wanted to like this book. After all, I have managed to enjoy the first Twilight book and movie in the past (though to be fair, it’s been years since I engaged with either version of that story), and I liked Midnight Soil well enough. Vampires are clearly trending again in the book world, and I was so ready to like this. Unfortunately, it fell short of my expectations.

Firstly, I will say that the setting was pretty cool. I loved my too-brief visit to the Scottish highlands several years ago, and so seeing it again in book form was delightful; Summerlee really captured the feel of that part of the world. Also, there’s Tynahine, the university for blood-drinking humanoids. A vampire academy, if you will. Oh, wait, that’s taken? Never mind, then. Anyway, I thought the idea of the recently integrated human-vampire school was an excellent one. Tynahine as a location and concept were great. And finally, the idea of a vampire and a vampire hunter falling in love is such a good idea! This book has all the bones of a fantastic story.

However, I really struggled with this, especially with the romance. Initially, Rebecca and Aliz have a fairly standard-for-romance-books adversarial relationship, mostly due to Rebecca’s prejudice against vampires. However, this tension feels a little forced, at least from Aliz’s side. It didn’t make sense that she responds to Rebecca’s attitude with such vitriol in their first few interactions, considering we hadn’t seen her display any rudeness toward anyone else. If she’d been more like a vampire Regina George, I would have been totally fine with it (actually, I would have loved that). But as it is, I feel like I didn’t understand Aliz at the beginning, and unfortunately, that never improved. I don’t think I ever had a solid handle on her motivations for anything, or knew why she changed her mind about and started caring about Rebecca. She seems so mercurial and vaguely characterized. This made it really hard to care about their burgeoning “love” story.

Another element to their dynamic that really drove me crazy was also toward the beginning, before Aliz and Rebecca even speak. (Um, minor spoilers, I guess?) Early on, Rebecca overhears Aliz having an amorous encounter with someone in the stacks of a library. Instantly, Rebecca extrapolates that Aliz must make a habit of having semi-public hookups with people, and she feels such disdain about it. This seems too judgemental, considering she has basically no evidence to support her conclusion (one data point is not enough, dude!). And yes, perhaps it’s not in great taste to hook up with someone where others (who haven’t consented to being a party to sexual activities) can hear, but Rebecca’s anger and harsh feelings is purely from the concept that Aliz must sleep around a lot. I’ll allow that Rebecca does eventually chill out about this as she gets to know Aliz and as the real plot progresses, but her initial slut-shaming attitude turned me off her character.

There are also a few elements to the plot that I felt were either not explained well enough or simply foolish. The entire weirdness about Rebecca taking allicin pills to disguise the smell of her special blood (a character trait that just screams Bella Swan) was just odd, as was her bizarre choice to stop doing so. Apparently she thought that making herself more conspicuous and tempting to all the other vampires in the school was worth it, simply to mitigate the possibility that Aliz would die from garlic exposure if, and lots of emphasis on if, she bit her. I was so frustrated by this that I ranted to a friend for like ten minutes about how nonsensical this was (sorry, Katherine). And then there was all the backstory about Callisto, the group of hunters, and their relationship to the vampire council. There was an interesting foundation laid, about how powerful groups can pull strings behind the scenes, and about how it’s not always good to blindly trust your superiors, but none of this was given the depth it deserved.

In the end, I really wish I liked The Book of Blood and Roses, but the concept was much better than its execution. The protagonists were either unlikable or underdeveloped, and the plot didn’t have enough explanation or sense. I did really like the setting, and some of the side characters were excellent, but by the final act of the book, I wasn’t invested in what was happening. And I really wish that weren’t the case! Summerlee has some good ideas and a decent grasp on storytelling and pacing, and I’d be willing to read something else by her someday. However, I don’t think I’ll read the conclusion to this duology when it comes out.

The Book of Blood and Roses is available now!