Blood and Ash Series (1-4)
⭐⭐
Buckle your seatbelts friends. I binged this so fast I can’t remember what happened when, so we’re lumping the first 4 books together. (5 isn’t out yet.) I give it 2 stars; as opinionated as I was while reading it I could not put it down. But much like reading Divergent after The Hunger Games, reading Blood and Ash after A Court of Thorns and Roses leaves you feeling like some small but key piece was lost along the way.
I’ve kept this as high-level as I can, but there will be some spoilers below. Read at your own risk.
We have the heroine Poppy, a woman somehow so tiny that every time she borrows clothes they’re comically large on her, but also so big that she’s plagued by constant insecurity. She’s grotesquely scarred but so beautiful that every man who sees her falls in love. I will give the author points for one
aspect - I’m pretty sure Poppy had a full blown meltdown when she first figured out what was going on, which is a nice departure from the usual super-efficient acceptance rate of chosen heroines. But she’s also SO slow on the uptake, especially at the beginning. Armentrout dumps buckets of foreshadowing on the audience while Poppy is apparently too busy lusting after the new guardsman to register any of it. She does speed up the learning curve as we move through the series, but eventually accumulates so many power-ups that she can just bulldoze through any obstacles instead of learning or developing forethought. I enjoyed Poppy’s inclination to violence, but the deeper into the series we got the more self-doubt she had about her own rage. This could have been an exploration into the impact of people’s accumulated trauma once they get power of their own but instead it felt like each internal monologue was copy-pasted from the one before.
We can’t have a fearless heroine without her star-crossed love, so let's talk about Casteel. He is every territorial Dark Prince character, and while he generally figures out what’s going on faster than Poppy he also lacks any sort of actual character development throughout the series. He constantly pushes or ignores Poppy’s boundaries and refuses to tell her things she needs to know. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good dose of tall-dark-handsome-and-angsty, but they also need some personality quirks to keep it interesting. Casteel’s name feels like a ripoff of Supernatural, and his character felt like one of those face-merge things of every Dark Prince archetype I’ve read. Is he angsting in a scene because that’s who he is, or because his character has to hit a certain quota before the halfway point of the book? I couldn’t always tell. I’d say he and Poppy were made for each other, but that would imply I’m ok with their relationship as it is and I cannot express how badly they need couples counseling to learn how to communicate. Having sex is not the same as talking about your problems. Post-coital endorphins do not mean you’ve resolved the fight! In all fairness, Casteel just hits two of my biggest pet peeves - disrespecting boundaries and poor communication. Other readers probably won’t find it such a frustrating combination.
On a related note, a moment of silence for the long suffering Lucien. He’s Casteel’s childhood friend, confidant, second in command, and scapegoat. He acts as mediator for the dramatic duo throughout the series. Frankly I want a spinoff book just about him. Instead we get possibly the most interesting aspect of this series. Starting in the very first book, Armentrout starts teasing a threesome between Lucien, Casteel, and Poppy. This was a big part of what kept me reading if I’m being honest - I wanted to see if the publishers would actually follow through or if they would take the cowards way out. It took longer than necessary, but Armentrout followed through! Unfortunately by the time we get to it there have been so many other sex scenes that the excitment was gone. The series was clearly meant to be a super spicy fantasy adventure a la A Court of Thorns and Roses, but Armentrout somehow sacrificed both emotional development for plot speed and plot intricacy for extra sex. The potential is there, but the balance is not. I do respect the book for committing - we hit the first sex scene within 5 pages of starting the book, which is convenient in its efficiency - read chapter 1. If you enjoy it, you’ll enjoy the series. If not, you haven’t wasted much time.
On the whole the book felt a lot like scrolling social media. I’d get a solid chuckle from a good one liner in one minute and be frustrated by odd writing choices the next. (Why so many ellipses? Why?) Sporadic moments would be absolute gold, but they were inconsistent and didn’t quite make up for the books overall. The worldbuilding is a good example of this - many of the names are questionable at best, and the initial setup is a blatant vampire/werewolf ripoff. But Armentrout shifts as we get deeper into the story, pulling elements that felt inspired by Greek mythology but were unique enough that I didn’t see them coming and want to know more. I struggled with the 3rd and 4th books because I thought this was a trilogy and then a quad. I’ll be frustrated if the series goes longer than 5 - while the last few books have had the most interesting flashes of worldbuilding, they also don’t have nearly enough plot to explain the page length. In an alternate universe this entire series was a fast-paced and mindblowing trilogy. If you enjoyed Twilight and don’t have the same pet peeves as I do, this will likely be a good guilty pleasure read. I’m going to pick up the next book when it comes out, but I don’t plan to revisit this in future.
I paired this with the Vamp cocktail purely for the name. The drink ended up fitting though - both too strong thanks to the scotch and too sweet from the OJ, its basically guaranteed to leave a hangover next morning. Much like the book, you won’t feel great by the time you’re done but damn if you’re going to let a dressed-up mimosa go to waste. If you know what you like, enjoy! My gin and tonics and I will be hiding back in the modern romance section for a bit to recover.
The Vamp
Ingredients
2 ounces Scotch (preferably Dewar's White Label)
½ ounce orange liqueur (preferably Gran Gala)
2 ounces orange juice
½ ounce fresh lemon juice
2 dashes of Angostura bitters
Shake all ingredients, and strain into a wine glass over ice. Garnish with a flamed orange peel.
Garnish - Cut a sliver of peel from the orange. Warm it briefly with a match or lighter, then using a pinching motion fold it in half (outer peel side in) over the flame towards the drink. The oil in the peel should shoot out and flame up. Definitely optional, but also the most fun part of this drink. Otherwise its basically just a scotch mimosa.
