By: Robin
Wasserman
Published: April
10, 2012
Published By:
Random House Children’s Books
Description: It
was like a nightmare, but there was no waking up. When the night began,
Nora had two best friends and an embarrassingly storybook one true love.
When it ended, she had nothing but blood on her hands and an echoing scream
that stopped only when the tranquilizers pierced her veins and left her in the
merciful dark.
But the next morning, it was all still true: Chris was dead. His girlfriend Adriane, Nora's best friend, was catatonic. And Max, Nora's sweet, smart, soft-spoken Prince Charming, was gone. He was also—according to the police, according to her parents, according to everyone—a murderer.
Desperate to prove his innocence, Nora follows the trail of blood, no matter where it leads. It ultimately brings her to the ancient streets of Prague, where she is drawn into a dark web of secret societies and shadowy conspirators, all driven by a mad desire to possess something that might not even exist. For buried in a centuries-old manuscript is the secret to ultimate knowledge and communion with the divine; it is said that he who controls the Lumen Dei controls the world. Unbeknownst to her, Nora now holds the crucial key to unlocking its secrets. Her night of blood is just one piece in a puzzle that spans continents and centuries. Solving it may be the only way she can save her own life.
But the next morning, it was all still true: Chris was dead. His girlfriend Adriane, Nora's best friend, was catatonic. And Max, Nora's sweet, smart, soft-spoken Prince Charming, was gone. He was also—according to the police, according to her parents, according to everyone—a murderer.
Desperate to prove his innocence, Nora follows the trail of blood, no matter where it leads. It ultimately brings her to the ancient streets of Prague, where she is drawn into a dark web of secret societies and shadowy conspirators, all driven by a mad desire to possess something that might not even exist. For buried in a centuries-old manuscript is the secret to ultimate knowledge and communion with the divine; it is said that he who controls the Lumen Dei controls the world. Unbeknownst to her, Nora now holds the crucial key to unlocking its secrets. Her night of blood is just one piece in a puzzle that spans continents and centuries. Solving it may be the only way she can save her own life.
My Thoughts: The
Book of Blood and Shadow really surprised me, and in a really good way. It’s
kind of a bit of murder mystery with a slice of historical fiction and a twinge
of running for your life.
It began slow. We followed Nora as she began going to a new
school, met some new people, and became a teacher’s aide. The teacher had an
obsession with an ancient manuscript, and she and her friend’s job was to
translate and decipher it, only after a while, strange things start to happen.
Their teacher gets put in a coma, her best friend Chris dies, his girlfriend
Adrienne is in shock and Max has disappeared and is thought to be the murderer.
The only thing Nora can think is that it all has something
to do with what’s in the manuscript, and Nora is determined to figure out the
secrets hidden in it. It takes her on a journey deep into Prague where she
uncovers secrets that others would prefer would be left covered, and doing so
may just get her killed.
In the beginning, I wasn’t too involved in the story, but
slowly but surely it dragged me under, until I couldn’t wait to see what would
happen next. I listened to this in audiobook format and the narrator was
perfect. She set the entire tone for the story.
This book was full of information that you couldn’t miss. It
had love, loss, betrayal, pain, guilt, anger, torture, fanaticism, fear, and
everything in between. Nothing was as it seemed and everything happened for a
reason.
3 comments:
This book sounds super interesting and I love the cover. It's a bit different to the books I usually read but I'm already invested trying to figure out what happened.
It was different for me too, but in a good way. I'm so used to knowing what to expect, and here I had no idea
Sherre! It's been far too long since I have posted on your blog, forgive me! I really enjoyed this review because I love it when you read a book that your not sure about at first but then out of now where it just takes you over and you can't wait to get to the end of it. I read a mystery fiction book recently, called The Paladin Prophecy, it was really good and really piqued my interest in mystery books more, so I think I'll definitely give this book a consideration when doing my next book haul!
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