Antonia Bernardin

The 34th book I read this year was Bride by Ali Hazelwood, whose most well known for her Steminist romance books but this is a fantasy romance book!

A vague summary

In this world there are vampires, humans and werewolves. Humans and vampires have a wary truce in this city thanks to the exchanging of ‘collateral’, one human child swapped for one vampire child, for the entirety of their childhood. Humans and werewolves do not get on, werewolves and vampires reeeeally do not get on.

Our main character, Misery, is the daughter of the leader of the vampiric council and was formerly the vampire collateral. Once she returned to vampire society they treated her like an outsider, so she’s been hiding among the humans with her foster sister for years. That is until her foster sister goes missing and her father summons her to tell her they have hatched a plan to form an alliance with the werewolves, through a marriage, acting as collateral. The humans have a new president, who is refusing to the continue handing over human children as collateral and is in talks with the werewolves. In attempt to get out ahead, her father plans to marry her off to secure an alliance with the wolves instead. Misery refuses until she learns the name of the wolf she will marry and it’s the same name that was written on her friends planner on the day she went missing. At the wedding, the groom reacts weirdly to her scent, despite this, the wedding still goes ahead. Misery finds herself in enemy territory yet again, surrounded by people who hate vampires. With her friends cat in toe, she’s confronted by a very persistent little wolf girl and the growing realisation of her feelings for Lowe and his community of wolves. Nothing will stop her from finding her friend though, not even love to a man who she overhears has his true mate somewhere out there anyway… or so she thinks.

What did I think?

I really enjoyed this book, it did rely a little too heavily on the miscommunication trope, as a lot of this authors books do, which was frustrating but didn’t take away from how much I enjoyed it overall.

I thought the word building was pretty decent, the exploration of vampire and werewolf powers was pretty good, none of it was told in a monologued, overt way, it all gets told pretty naturally in the narrative. I loved how sarcastic the main character was and her relationships to other characters outside of the love interest were so fun, she felt like a very well fleshed out person.

It’s aways a risk when authors hop genres but I think in this case it paid off, this was genuinely good read!

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