Blood of My Blood – Barry Lyga
Release Date: September 9th 2013
Little Brown: Young Adult
468 pages (Hardcover)
*** This will contain spoilers, as it is the last book in this trilogy so be warned!
Also I have a review for the first two books in the series, book 1 – I Hunt Killers, book 2 –Game, and you can read those, catch up on the series and meet back for the last book!
If you don’t feel anything, you can’t be hurt. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about what happened. Don’t think about it you’re good at it you’re good at compartmentalizing don’t think don’t think don’t-
My mind is literally comatose as the moment. My thoughts are coherent and I keep repeatedly screaming, “What?!” into my pillow. My heart rate is going a millions beats per second I feel like I’m speed. What the hell just happened?
I think you can conclude the book was a hurricane of emotions for me.
My hands are shaking as I write this review because I can’t decipher if I am happy or upset or just tired. The emotions within me are swirling in a big pot of what-did-I-just-read-and-what-was-that-ending-and-did-that-really-just-happen feelings. Barry Lyga threw me into an exploding bomb of feels and I can’t, I just can’t right now. I’m happy, I am. But I’m also confused, so confused.
I want to say that this book is beautiful but beautiful by itself doesn’t describe the book right, it was disturbingly beautiful, eerily beautiful, and horrifyingly beautiful and all three perfectly describe the story. It describes how I felt, the emotional roller coaster I rode while reading this book. This third and final book in the Jasper Dent series, definitely set standards above the first in its series. I loved the writing, how everything played out, how Jasper kind of got his justice or his version of justice. The pace was fast, the suspense was played out very well that I, again, had to refrain myself from skipping to end and finding out who did it. Who was behind it all and I sure did get my answer and while a lot of people may say they saw it coming, I had a inkling, but I was still shocked nonetheless.
The book begins where book 2 left off – Jasper is locked in a storage room with a gunshot, Howie is in the hospital from almost bleeding out again, and Billy has Connie. When I was left with this ending I was upset, you can’t end a book like that! I know I am just a reader but still you cannot do that to your readers unless you are evil and I know while Barry Lyga thinks like someone evil he isn’t that cruel. But it happened and that’s where we start off.
Blood of My Blood is so dark, so much darker than the first book, than the second book and it was just executed just right, I loved it. I ate up every bloody word, every death in this book I saw coming and I wanted them to happen. While that sounds creepy and I apologize for that, it’s like the book changes your mentality just for a second, I saw and felt Jasper’s pain and I wanted revenge like Jasper, I wanted his sanity to stay sane and stay right. Jasper becomes another person in this book, not someone else completely but someone that has been hiding inside him and he finally lets it out. He knows being good and going with the rules isn’t getting him anywhere to his father and his games, including the mysterious Ugly J that also has come into play. I was excited, to see Jazz come out and play just as his father is, the think and be like a killer, not necessarily killing but acting like one, hiding like one and using all the moves to get what he is after – Billy.
Billy is such a strange character in this series and we see a whole lot more of Billy in this book, he has his own chapter and we see and hear everything through him and it’s actually fascinating. What freaked me out about Billy was his care for Jazz. You would think he’s a heartless man since he has 100+ kills notched in his belt but when it comes to Jazz he genuinely cares. The whole thing is odd and actually saddens me because someone who is so messed up can love but he doesn’t show it as it should be.
This brings me to the concept of Jazz and his messed up childhood. We find out what has been the reason for his dreams about sex and what it means exactly, who is the woman and why he is afraid and how the outcome will affect him. We get so many answers about the questions we were left with and it left me speechless. Lyga knows exactly how to rip out your emotions, play around with them and then shove it back into your chest like nothing happen. But it did happen! I was shocked beyond reason and I swear there was tears leaking out of my eyes. Reading about it all made me want to rip out my own hair like it all happened to me.
Barry Lyga threw so many turning points at me that I didn’t realize I had finished reading the book until I was staring at the last page for minutes. This book was amazing, it destroyed me, it was what I wanted and my questions were answered, thankfully, and the outcome of it all ended not as I wanted but it ended nicely.
Overall I love/hated the book, I hated how I felt and how my emotions betrayed me but I loved it all because of the hectic emotions, I give it 5 well deserved stars and look forward to reading more from Barry Lyga soon. Thank you readers for reading and I will leave you with a quick quote that I loved and perfectly explained the book to me. I will have another blog post up soon.
What is it like to go looking for your soul, only to learn you never had one to begin with?
Over and out.
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