My Love Lies Bleeding - Alyxandra Harvey

My Love Lies Bleeding is the first book (and debut novel) in The Drake Chronicles series by Alyxandra Harvey. It was published in the UK on 4th January 2010 by Bloomsbury and it is 256 pages long. Thanks to Bloomsbury for sending me a copy for review!

Plot
Solange Drake is the only female vampire to ever be born and is part of an old vampire family. The Drakes. Solange isn’t an only child though, she has seven vampire brothers. Being the only female vampire to be born is far from a blessing for Solange as the Queen sees her as a threat and most male vampires want her for themselves. As her sixteenth birthday approaches, the Drake family realise the danger of Solange’s upcoming change into a full vampire…if she makes it through the change.

Solange is kidnapped very close to her birthday and it seems like best friend Lucy and older brother Nicholas are the only people who can save her. They set out on a rescue mission but there is something between Lucy and Nicholas that they have both been fighting for quite some time. Loving a vampire can’t be that bad…can it?

What I thought
I love anything that has some mythology behind the story so once I realised there was a lot more to this book than the main plot, I was excited. Even though there are quite a few different vampire clans, they are easy to distinguish one from another so I never felt confused by this aspect. I’d like to find out about some of the other clans in future books. I really liked the idea that Solange was the only born female vampire and how that made the current Queen feel. This was a completely unique aspect for me because I have never read anything else with something like this before.

My Love Lies Bleeding is narrated by both Luce and Solange, enabling me to be able to really get into the story. Hearing the story from two different aspects let me know what was happening at different times and in different places so I felt like I knew exactly what was going on at all times. I was surprised to see how much action there was in this book. Even though the synopsis sounded like it would be quite exciting, I really wasn’t expecting there to be so much. The action scenes are very well paced and breaks up the rest of the story. There is so much happening on both sides of the story and I really felt like anything could have happened, knowing that there will be more books in the series.

Both Luce and Solange also have their own love interests so it was a welcome change to not see a love triangle at all. As the book is quite short, I did feel like both of these relationships could have been expanded on a bit more, especially when it came to Luce and Nicholas. I instantly liked both characters because they had strong personalities. Luce wasn’t afraid of anything, maybe because she had pretty much grown up with a family of vampires. She was very strong and was quite the match for Nicholas who was a bit cocky and full of himself at times. Luce never lets him feel as though he is better because he is a vampire and she’s determined to make sure everyone knows that being a human doesn’t mean she is useless.

Luce and Nicholas’ relationship was an interesting one because there were so many feelings that weren’t always explained fully. To Luce, Nicholas goes from being Solange’s annoying brother to someone who totally shocks her to someone she finds herself liking a lot more than she should. The tension between the two was really well written and believable because of this. I could feel the strain between the two because of who they both are and I liked learning more as their relationship developed.

I thoroughly enjoyed My Love Lies Bleeding and I’m now really looking forward to reading the second and third books in the series: Blood Feud and Out For Blood. Hopefully the other Drake brothers are just as hot as Nicholas.