Review: Half-Blood by Jennifer Armentrout

Half-Blood by Jennifer L. Armentrout

My rating: 2 of 5 teacups


Surely this book is illegal. I mean, someone once tried to sue J.K. Rowling because their book included a kind of wizard sport tournament similar to the one found in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, they claimed she had stolen the idea from them... and this small matter takes up such a minuscule percentage of the novel! Not to mention the fact that no one I knew had ever heard of the guy's novel before...

Now, pretty much everyone I speak to has heard of - if not read - the Vampire Academy series. The first two thirds of Half-Blood is exactly the same as the first in the VA series, I'm not even exaggerating. There are some scenes where if you changed "Alex" to "Rose" and "Aiden" to "Dimitri" then you would have a difficult time guessing which book is which. In each novel, the protagonist has been away from their centre of training (St Vladimir's and The Covenant) for a long period of time. When they return, they are admitted for a trial period in which they must attend training by professional (and super sexy) hunters. In the training rooms, they fight the older and forbidden pros and get their arses handed to them repeatedly... then slowly they get better, stronger, and things start to get just a little too hot and sweaty between them and their trainers.

Oh, and another in-your-face similarity? There are pures and half-bloods, the former look down on the latter, pures would never stoop so low as to start a relationship with a half-blood, etc, etc. Alex, like Rose, is a half-blood. The only big difference is that Aiden, unlike Dimitri, is a pure. So the relationship in this novel is even more forbidden than the one in Vampire Academy. But I was just astounded by how many characters mirrored the ones in VA, this wasn't an accident, it simply couldn't be.

Two stars on goodreads means "it was ok" and, trust me, this very nearly got one star because plagiarism is never ok. But there was a big improvement in the last third that gave me the feeling that the second book in this series - Pure - would leave the VA books alone and show some originality. Things started to branch off from the obviously stolen idea and take their own shape; like the introduction of Apollyon (a half-blood who is granted super powers in order to keep pures in check, but only one can exist at any given time) and some other interesting discoveries that I can't talk about without giving away huge spoilers.

Even though Half-Blood is a well-written, dark and sexy novel, I couldn't help but be turned off when I discovered that the author had taken someone else's idea. Perhaps I'd have felt differently if I hadn't just read Vampire Academy in 2011? I don't know, but I'm not particularly interested in reading Pure right now.