Half-Blood
The Hematoi descend from the unions of gods and mortals, and the children of two Hematoi-pure-bloods-have godlike powers. Children of Hematoi and mortals-well, not so much. Half-bloods only have two options: become trained Sentinels who hunt and kill daimons or become servants in the homes of the pures.
Seventeen-year-old Alexandria would rather risk her life fighting than waste it scrubbing toilets, but she may end up slumming it anyway. There are several rules that students at the Covenant must follow. Alex has problems with them all, but especially rule #1:Relationships between pures and halfs are forbidden. Unfortunately, she's crushing hard on the totally hot pure-blood Aiden. But falling for Aiden isn't her biggest problem--staying alive long enough to graduate the Covenant and become a Sentinel is. If she fails in her duty, she faces a future worse than death or slavery: being turned into a daimon, and being hunted by Aiden. And that would kind of suck.
My eyes snapped open as the freakish sixth sense kicked my fight or flight response into overdrive.
Half-Blood is completely different from the story we find in
Obsidian. I mean, we're going from aliens to Greek mythology; there is a bit of a gap in subject matter there. But that fact alone has us falling deeper in love with Armentrout's writing, simply because when we pick up any one of her books, we know that we won't be reading the same story with different characters or vice versa. Alex, the main character, has a perspective that's completely her own, and while both
Kate and she share a creator, their voices are distinctly separate. Alex comes across as more of a tough bad girl who's fast on her feet and quick with her punches, eager to take on the foes of her world.
I have to admit, however, that out of the two star boys in her books,
Daemon is absolutely my favorite. There's this annoying perfection about Aiden - though his hotness helps blind me to that - whereas Daemon is - no way to sugarcoat it - an asshole, exhibiting some type of personality flaws, though lovable. As much as I would like to say that I'm straight up Team Aiden, Seth is also very appealing somehow (maybe cos he
is flawed? Or maybe I'm just attracted to a-holes?), and so I'm going to stick with their being too little about both in the book for me to firmly make up my mind.
Besides Alex's voice, what sold me on this book was her cryptic relationship to the gods of Greek mythology, the mystery of these daemons (they remind me of Richelle Mead's Strigoi), and those wicked beings' connection to the mythology as well. I'm excited to see where Armentrout is going to take her story from here.
