Review: My Love Lies Bleeding (Drake Chronicles #1) - Alyxandra Harvey

Name: My Love Lies Bleeding (Drake Chronicles #1)

Author: Alyxandra Harvey

General Release Date: 12th July 2009

Date I finished it: 14th August 2011

Type: Paperback

From: Review copy from publishers

My Rating: 4/5 stars

I received this book for review from Bloomsbury, it took me so long to finally get around to reading it and I don't really know why. I have heard lots of good things about this series, but for some reason it got put somewhere near the bottom of my to be read list.

I am so glad I finally picked up this book because I loved it!

My Love Lies Bleeding follows Solange Drake and her best friend Lucy, seems pretty normal so far right?

Well Solange comes from a vampire family, in fact one of the strongest vampire families around and when she reaches her 16th birthday she will have to go through the change and become a vampire like her brothers all have before. Solange is not just any vampire girl though, she is the first girl born in a vampire family for as far back as anyone can remember because of this most people either want to kill her or marry her.

As if that wasn't enough Solange has seven older brothers all ready to die to protect her, meaning she gets almost no space or time to herself at home. Her best friend Lucy is human, but has grown up practically living with the Drake's so she is used to all their little quirks, like drinking blood out of wine glasses!

The story is told by switching between both Solange and Lucy's viewpoint, which usually I don't really like when I am reading, but for some reason this switching around really works in this case. I actually really liked finding out about what each girl thought and their different opinions on the same situation.

The family dynamics in the book is brilliant, I loved reading about all the different family members and how they interact with each other. Since the family are vampires they have members who were around in different important historical times, and this snippets of history and mannerisms have rubbed off on some of the Drake children which I found really fun to read. It was like a disguised history lesson in a book!

Yes like most YA paranormal books there is a romance element, I actually really enjoyed these scenes in the book and the romance was worked in well with the true nature of the story.

Overall a really great twist on the usual vampire books and I will be carrying on with this series!