Book Review - Bloodtraitor

Maeve'ra Trilogy

Bloodtraitor

Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

series-review-maevera-trilogy - My review of the first two novels before Blood Traitor was published.

3 stars
easy read
ya/ fantasy / shapeshifters / fiction / vampires

I was really excited about this series when I read Bloodwitch, and now I just wish it had been a standalone. There was so much potential and seeing it go to waste it heartbreaking.
These books should be published in a box set or omnibus, they really should be read back to back, in fact they are so short and easy to read if you had to add the second and third novel it should have just been one novel.
Unfortunately for me and for this book review the third novel was not yet published when I read the first two books, so there was a period of more than year between reading the second and third novel. In that period my opinions of the novels changed a little bit and much of that change was from the wait.
The first issue that started before I even started the third novel was how little I remembered from the first two, normally I can read the synopsis of all three novels again and draw the major points out of my memory, when I hit a total blank its generally a sign, and not a good sign. I had zero interest in rereading so I had to put the novel down and give up on the trilogy or go ahead and hope that it all fell into place. Obviously I took the second option.

This is where the mixed feelings come into play.
The overall story is pretty good, the characters are alright - not fantastic and I found no connections other than Vance in the first novel - the setting is terrible, the timeline is confusing, and there is a overall feeling of Incomplete. I could kind of tell where Rhodes had tried to go which leaves me wondering about her editor and the publisher who should have told her to pick method and stick with it.

Lots was missing in expressing this whole world (that was maybe semi set by a previous series I have not read?) the world couldn't decide if it was total fantasy or kinda partially reality based, throwing in names associated with certain cultures or places - past and present such as America, and Aztecs - that specifically stands out as something that took so much away from the book, those referable names added yet more confusion to an already complicated issue. I found there was so much detail that you got no information, the information you did get lead to more questions that in the end were never answered. I would start a list but it would be pages and pages long at this point.
There was little to indicate change as we jumped between past, present, future, reality, internal or external voice and visions - you did eventually figure out that you had made a leap and then when or were or who of it but why would I want to be figuring that out all the time? . I think this was supposed to add mystery or a sophisticated "layer" but failed. Then with each novel a different narrator... So much was lost by having first Vance, then Kadee, then Malachi narrate, and what is really frustrating is how unnecessary that change was, all three characters where present through all three novels. Another character problem was everyone was a main character or a minimal character. It didn't have that three or four tier layer of characters, with your protagonist, his main three or four, the supporting and then the background characters. With every single character trying to be in the spot light it has a serious case of "everyone is special which makes no one special" which is were connecting to the characters fell through.

It would have been so easy to eliminate these problems, it makes me so mad!