A review by waywardskyril
How to Sell Your Blood & Fall in Love by D.N. Bryn

adventurous emotional hopeful tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I read How to Sell Your Blood and Fall In Love for Indie Ink Awards 2023/2024, and it turned out to be not only my favorite book of the event (out of several great books) but one of my favorite books of the year.

When he let his gaze detach, he could almost feel a shudder along his spine from the ragged way Justin groaned.

To be completely up front, my life has been extra crazy all of 2024, so this will likely not be quite the full-throated shout from the rooftops How to Sell Your Blood and Fall In Love deserves for how SUPERB it is, but I will do my best because this book deserves all the love and attention it can get, especially after its author was libeled by a now-known grifter of the book community.

Going into this one, I was unsure of how much I would end up liking it for several reasons, but a couple of which being that, one, I hadn’t been reading anything but short books for a while and, two, I’ve never read many books with asexual characters, especially romance books. I wasn’t opposed to the concept but wasn’t sure what to expect from the content.

”There's something else I'd rather bite… right under their noses."
What would it be like to be bitten here, to feel the rush of the venom while surrounded by these strangers and their sideways glances and unsated curiosity? His heart thudded faster. He wanted to know; he wanted to feel Clem's fangs in him like a dirty secret.”

Let me just start by saying Clementine is PRECIOUS and a little closer to the demisexual spectrum, and Justin Yu’s feelings about Clementine made everything inside of me go flip-flop upside-down crazy, giggly, and screaming-into-a-pillow-in-the middle-of-the-night GIDDY. These characters… They’re so good. They’re so real and intentional. They’re so loveable. They’re so LIKABLE as people. They have faults and they have wants and desires and they have responsibilities and all of these things are tugging them in different, scattered directions, and yet they keep coming back to each other for… increasingly personal reasons. These characters were everything I didn’t know I wanted and then some. They’re those rare magical unicorns that will stick with me forever. I'm not even exaggerating. It's been a few months since I read this, and I can still bring to mind these two with striking clarity - and not just their faces, but their hearts, emotions, desires. They've engraved themselves on me a bit.

The beautiful creation of these characters woven with the lush, emotional writing had pages dissolving beneath my eyes, page count quickly forgotten. I could have read a couple hundred MORE pages from this world, and I’ll absolutely be diving back in with the other books in this series.

When Clementine spoke, his voice came out not quite as he’d meant, darker somehow, and rumbling with a sound like a vampiric growl. He could feel his fangs out–had he ever put them away?–and he was suddenly aware of the lingering hints of Justin’s blood on his mouth. “I want you to scream for me.”

Besides these talented developments of writing and character building, the under-lying plot of How to Sell Your Blood and Fall In Love had me wondering how the story could possibly end, especially on a positive note, but somehow D.N. Bryn got us there - but not without some angsty up and downs and battle scenes first.

If you enjoy M/M romance with multi-layered characters with pasts and real life problems along with some supernatural interspecies yumminess, this is the book for you. Buckle up because once those pages start flipping they won’t want to stop. I'm SO GLAD I gave this book a shot for Indie Ink Awards, and I hope it gets some of the validation it receives. Regardless, I have a new author I'm going to be following forever!