📕 Title: The Book of Blood and Roses
✏️ Author: Annie Summerlee
📖 Genre: Paranormal Fantasy
⭐ Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
📝 Book One of The Callisto Chronicles
🏳️‍🌈 Sapphic Romance

BOOK BLURB

Vampire hunter Rebecca Charity goes undercover at a mysterious university, hoping to find the Book of Blood and Roses—a lost compendium of ways to kill vampires—and unexpectedly falls in love with her vampire roommate.

REVIEW

Thank you Del Rey for the copy of this book!

The vampires in this book felt very traditional, their characteristics mostly aligning with popular media representations, and the vampire hunter falling for a vampire trope felt fairly standard. Still, I really enjoyed the dynamic between Rebecca, a vampire hunter, and Aliz, a vampire who is the heir of a powerful family.

Rebecca’s personal reasons for becoming a hunter strengthened her initial hatred towards Aliz and sold me on the “enemies” part of the enemies to lovers arc. I loved the forced proximity aspect of the story and how the two are forced to work together to break the curse. Rebecca’s concealment of her identity as a hunter creates high tension as she slowly falls for Aliz and begins to trust her. I appreciated that Aliz was cognizant of potential consent issues given that vampires have the ability to compel humans. There is a bit of spice and the two women have great chemistry!

The stakes felt high given the impending deadline and the pace felt consistent throughout the story. I would describe this as a medium paced story overall with some fast paced action scenes. The conclusion was very satisfying! While this is the first book of The Callisto Chronicles and it’s implied that the story will continue, I think this could also be read as a standalone novel. However, I’m very interested in continuing the series and seeing what Rebecca and Aliz get up to next!