Blood and Snow by RaShelle Workman

Title: Blood and Snow (Blood and Snow #1)
Author: RaShelle Workman
Format: Kindle Edition, 53 pages
Pub. Date: June 6th 2012
Source: Amazon freebie

★★

Two torn stars.

Salem, Massachusetts is a place where magic is expected to happen. But the uniquely named Snow White never imagines that such things will happen to her. Sure, she's constantly reminded of her fairy tale name, and it doesn't help that she has seven best guy friends. Her sixteenth birthday is rapidly approaching, and her weird dreams of being bitten by a vampire and eating a heart are only dreams.... Right?

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Why must the books I've read lately make me agonize over a final rating? It's mentally exhausting. In a nutshell, this book kept my attention but not without a slew of bad writing and young adult cliches.

-This novella has managed to take all of my irritations about the young adult genre and bundle them up within its pages. Things such as:
An instant blossoming love.
A plain character with a hot friend who is inexplicably still their friend.
Writing. That. Looks. Like. This.
A random vampire appears!
A character with only one parent
A girl who doesn't realize that boys are attracted to her until way late in the game

-There's also a few things within the writing that made me dislike this story. For instance, if I read about the scent of peppermint coming from a tea, or a boy, or anything one more time, I would have flipped my table. There was also way more talk about how the characters looked or dressed as opposed to their personality. It gave the book a shallow, plastic-y vibe to it, and I didn't learn anything about the characters at all. There were also instances of poor word choice, such as keys 'coincidentally' being on the wall marked "keys" and the quote "It's icky, and it makes me feel icky."

+That being said, I do like the concept of a Snow White vampire retelling. I love fairy tales, and I love vampires when their well written.

This book leaves a lot to be desired, and doesn't do the town of Salem justice. And yet, in spite all of the novella's shortcomings.... I still want to read the next one. The first one ends with a cliffhanger, and god damn it I invested that much time in reading it, and I want the whole story. It's for that reason, and that reason only, that this book gets two stars instead of one.

If you like young adult stories or fairy tale retellings, maybe you'll enjoy it. But, at this point in the Blood and Snow series (who knows, maybe it gets better?) I wouldn't really recommend it.