Book: Anna Dressed In Blood by Kendare Blake

Published by Tor Teen (211 pages)

Purchased for my Nook

Genre: YA: Paranormal- Ghosts/Horror

Find out more: Goodreads~Barnes And Noble~Amazon~Kendare Blake

Goodreads Summary: Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation: He kills the dead.

So did his father before him, until he was gruesomely murdered by a ghost he sought to kill. Now, armed with his father’s mysterious and deadly athame, Cas travels the country with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat. Together they follow legends and local lore, trying to keep up with the murderous dead—keeping pesky things like the future and friends at bay.

When they arrive in a new town in search of a ghost the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood, Cas doesn’t expect anything outside of the ordinary: track, hunt, kill. What he finds instead is a girl entangled in curses and rage, a ghost like he’s never faced before. She still wears the dress she wore on the day of her brutal murder in 1958: once white, now stained red and dripping with blood. Since her death, Anna has killed any and every person who has dared to step into the deserted Victorian she used to call home.

But she, for whatever reason, spares Cas’s life.

Anna Dressed In Blood got my attention because it’s about ghosts.  Not vampires or fairies or mermaids.  But ghosts!  They’re rare, it seems like, so I knew I had to read it.  Actually, there is a dash of horror, which seems equally rare in YA.

I liked it, and I loved seeing Anna’s story.  Okay, so Cas falling in love with Anna was a little unbelievable.  It is a paranormal book, though, so I’m willing to overlook that.  I do wish Blake had stuck with horror with a touch of paranormal, instead of the paranormal romance it seemed to turn into.  Cas as a character didn’t work for me, and I can’t exactly pinpoint why.  It is nice to see a male protagonist for once, but…I just didn’t really care about him either way.

But back to Anna.  Her story and the curse her mother put on her was interesting.  And I liked the creature that killed his dad.  Blake did create an interesting world, full of people with different abilities.

I don’t think I’m interested in reading the next book.  At least not right away.  It gets a 3 out of 5.  I liked it, but it’s not one of my favorites.