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A review by vikingwolf
Blood for Blood by Ryan Graudin
2.0
I very much enjoyed 'Wolf By Wolf' but circumstances meant that I only got round to reading this sequel years later. Now I'm wishing I hadn't spent my time on it to be honest. In the first book, Yael is focused, smart, able to think on her feet and perform her duty with no distractions getting in her way, exactly as she was trained. However it seems that in this book, she decides to put the entire mission at risk by ignoring her training and common sense because of two boys. Seriously Yael I'm disappointed in you, and to a certain extent, your colleague who I'm not naming for spoiler reasons.
The characters certainly annoyed me in this book. Let's start with Yael. Her decision in the last book to leave Felix alive when he can pass on the information about her tattoos is madness. You're trying to kill Hitler, end an evil regime and save millions of people here but you let him live when he can identify you and pass that detail on? Kind of defeats the point of stealing Adele's identity to allow her angry brother to pass on details to the enemy. Same with her lack of suspicion over the 'plane scene'. Likewise when Luka behaves like an idiot at the dock, she should've left him and escaped in order to continue the mission. After the failed attempt, she should have been regrouping and getting in touch with the resistance as millions of lives were at stake. Instead she wants to save Luka because she fancies him and Felix because she feels bad about impersonating his sister. Also her version of a lie detector fails to take into account the very obvious drug issue.
Luka annoys me for the majority of the book with his stupid comments which keep landing them in trouble and his stupidity at the house lets Felix do something even dumber. However he does start redeeming himself towards the end. Felix could not be any dumber. It didn't seem to matter how much evidence of war crimes and lies he saw, he still thinks that the Nazi is going to honour his promise. Even when he finds out about the secret project, even when the resistance prove their case over and over, he's still too stupid to actually listen and learn. I truly did hate his character as the book progressed. It was infuriating.
The biggest problem for me was the lack of plot for the first two thirds of the book. We failed to kill Hitler so we just travel towards the resistance headquarters in the city with two guys that the other traveller doesn't trust, hoping somehow to find the heavily guarded Hitler who you can't identify because he has unknown numbers of shapeshifter clones running about impersonating him. Your plan is 'find him, kill him'. Right, really going to work after the failed murder at the end of the race because they'll never expect another hit! It's only when the plan changes after the detour that a plot really emerges and those chapters are better.
The problem is that it's basically a road movie without zombies or anything else happening to liven up the travel. The scariest bit was wondering if the old truck would get them there. It was slow enough but having everyone remember a few Christmas memories in these pointless interludes was just boring padding that didn't need to be there. Only that flashback to the death camp experiments with Yael's travel companion stood out from that. I just drifted along waiting for something to happen and thought longingly of the first book action.
Which brings me to the ending. I never normally put ending spoilers in my review but boy howdy I need to say something at how angry I was at the end of one characters story so don't read the rest of this paragraph if you don't want to know. Last chance...ok SPOILER. He just CANNOT get away with that, he just can't FFS! Yael delivered the first part of the promise but her friend should have taken revenge for his action. Me, I'd have shot HER in front of him. The book title is Blood For Blood after all and he deserved to suffer in my opinion, not get the ending he received. It's not what trained resistance fighters would do. Forget the humanity forgiveness crap, teaching him a lesson mattered more to me. Rant over.
SPOILERS OVER. Welcome back. The non spoiler thing I'll say about the ending is that it felt kind of rushed, spiralling quickly to a conclusion for me after a few hundred pages of padding with little plot and a weird chemistry free romance that I never really felt. This book really disappointed me in various ways but at least it was a two book series not a trilogy to sit through. I'd had enough of most of the characters at that point.
The characters certainly annoyed me in this book. Let's start with Yael. Her decision in the last book to leave Felix alive when he can pass on the information about her tattoos is madness. You're trying to kill Hitler, end an evil regime and save millions of people here but you let him live when he can identify you and pass that detail on? Kind of defeats the point of stealing Adele's identity to allow her angry brother to pass on details to the enemy. Same with her lack of suspicion over the 'plane scene'. Likewise when Luka behaves like an idiot at the dock, she should've left him and escaped in order to continue the mission. After the failed attempt, she should have been regrouping and getting in touch with the resistance as millions of lives were at stake. Instead she wants to save Luka because she fancies him and Felix because she feels bad about impersonating his sister. Also her version of a lie detector fails to take into account the very obvious drug issue.
Luka annoys me for the majority of the book with his stupid comments which keep landing them in trouble and his stupidity at the house lets Felix do something even dumber. However he does start redeeming himself towards the end. Felix could not be any dumber. It didn't seem to matter how much evidence of war crimes and lies he saw, he still thinks that the Nazi is going to honour his promise. Even when he finds out about the secret project, even when the resistance prove their case over and over, he's still too stupid to actually listen and learn. I truly did hate his character as the book progressed. It was infuriating.
The biggest problem for me was the lack of plot for the first two thirds of the book. We failed to kill Hitler so we just travel towards the resistance headquarters in the city with two guys that the other traveller doesn't trust, hoping somehow to find the heavily guarded Hitler who you can't identify because he has unknown numbers of shapeshifter clones running about impersonating him. Your plan is 'find him, kill him'. Right, really going to work after the failed murder at the end of the race because they'll never expect another hit! It's only when the plan changes after the detour that a plot really emerges and those chapters are better.
The problem is that it's basically a road movie without zombies or anything else happening to liven up the travel. The scariest bit was wondering if the old truck would get them there. It was slow enough but having everyone remember a few Christmas memories in these pointless interludes was just boring padding that didn't need to be there. Only that flashback to the death camp experiments with Yael's travel companion stood out from that. I just drifted along waiting for something to happen and thought longingly of the first book action.
Which brings me to the ending. I never normally put ending spoilers in my review but boy howdy I need to say something at how angry I was at the end of one characters story so don't read the rest of this paragraph if you don't want to know. Last chance...ok SPOILER. He just CANNOT get away with that, he just can't FFS! Yael delivered the first part of the promise but her friend should have taken revenge for his action. Me, I'd have shot HER in front of him. The book title is Blood For Blood after all and he deserved to suffer in my opinion, not get the ending he received. It's not what trained resistance fighters would do. Forget the humanity forgiveness crap, teaching him a lesson mattered more to me. Rant over.
SPOILERS OVER. Welcome back. The non spoiler thing I'll say about the ending is that it felt kind of rushed, spiralling quickly to a conclusion for me after a few hundred pages of padding with little plot and a weird chemistry free romance that I never really felt. This book really disappointed me in various ways but at least it was a two book series not a trilogy to sit through. I'd had enough of most of the characters at that point.