The Golden Lily by Richelle Mead

The Golden Lily (Bloodlines #2) by Richelle Mead ☆☆☆☆

I almost want to say this book was lucky to get four stars, but that's where I am really conflicted. There is a lot wrong with the book, but there is still also a lot that is right with it.

The story was just as gripping as all the other books in this series and the series is spun off from, Vampire Academy. And even though I enjoyed reading it, I found it took me awhile to get into it and I didn't find it that hard to set it down if something else came up. The culprit? There was no surprises.

The end of the Vampire Academy series ended with major surprises. The clues Mead left ended up leading in several directions, ones that seemed obvious and were wrong in the end and ones that I didn't see coming, but became obvious in hindsight. Bloodlines was similar. While there were a lot of obvious things going on, there were still surprises throughout. But in this book? Nothing surprised me. And I think that was the biggest let down when I finished it right now. I figured out all the clues before Sydney did and I hated her for her naivety as a character. And the clues were so obvious that I was hoping for those surprising twists that the other books had, but I didn't find them.

My other problem with the book was typos. Both the series before this and this series is riddled with typos and a new copy editor definitely needs to be hired, or at least someone needs to start doing their job because I've never read any other series with this many typos. Along the same lines as the typos, there are a lot of "writing techniques" used in here that no trained writer would actually use. In fact, some of the ones I caught were techniques I was told to avoid in my first fiction class for my undergrad Creative Writing degree.

Despite the flaws, I still liked the story. And most of all, I still love the characters. I fell in love with Adrian even more and wished I could smack him upside the head several times. And I realized just how much I missed his snark, though I would have loved even more of it.

I thought it was ridiculous that the next book in the series will be out in February, less than a year away. To me it showed why there is are many typos, because there isn't enough editing time to be had. But still, I can't help but be glad that I don't have that long to wait to keep this story going. Can't wait :)