Review: Blood Magic by Tessa Gratton

Format: Hardcover from local library

Summary from Tessa's website:
For Nick Pardee and Silla Kennicot, the cemetery is the center of everything.

Nick is a city boy angry at being forced to move back to the nowhere town of Yaleylah, Missouri where he grew up. He can’t help remembering his mom and the blood magic she practiced – memories he’s tried for five years to escape. Silla, though, doesn’t want to forget; her parents’ apparent murder-suicide left her numb and needing answers. When a book of magic spells in her dad’s handwriting appears on her doorstep, she sees her chance to unravel the mystery of their deaths.

Together they plunge into the world of dark magic, but when a hundred-year-old blood witch comes hunting for the bones of Silla’s parents and the spell book, Nick and Silla will have to let go of everything they believe about who they are, the nature of life and death, and the deadly secrets that hide in blood.

My thoughts: I originally put this book on hold because Tessa is one of Maggie Stiefvater's crit partners, and since I love Maggie's books, I figured that I would like Tessa's. I wasn't disappointed. Blood Magic is really well-written, with a couple of twists that I never saw coming.

On the whole, the book was excellent. There was one scene, however, that seriously grossed me out. I think that in just about any other book, this scene would have been close enough to the start of the story that I would be able to put the book down and walk away. But I wasn't able to. I did put the book down for a minute, but then I picked it back up, saying to myself, "No. This book is too good to put down just because of one ooky scene."

That being said, I really loved the dual narrative, which felt totally natural. I loved Silla's relationship with her brother Reese (Yay for healthy sibling relationships!), and I felt bad for Nick and his issues with his stepmother Lilith. At first, I was kind of confused as to why Lilith's name would be so obvious, but it made a certain sense that your (evil) stepmother's name would be the same as that of the mother of all demons. 


I felt that Nick and Silla's relationship progressed as naturally as you would expect it to when magic was involved, and I really liked that Nick wasn't controlling or manipulative or anything like that. He had his own problems, as did Silla, and it was nice to have the romance as an underlying plot instead of The Main Reason the story happens.


In short, Blood Magic is a fantastic book, and you should definitely read it. It's creepy, not enough so that it will keep you up at night, but enough that you'll be watching people's eyes very closely for a couple of days.

Tessa's blog, Facebook, Goodreads, twitter, and website. (There will be a companion novel, Blood Keeper, set to be published summer 2012.)