This easily belongs to the top 0.1% of urban fantasy and yet I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I would've expected.
The opening is very engaging and immediately captured me.
It's gruesome though. Really dark and gruesome.
The book uses every opportunity to insert world-building into normal situations in a natural fashion. but it's sometimes not very subtle about it but it never leads to painfully stilted dialogue.

While reading this book I constantly felt like the author was very aware of all the clichées and stereotypes as well as general genre tropes and either subtly and skillfully subverted or deliberately avoided them.

But this very aspect of the book makes things, I am usually comfortable talking about in a review, spoilery because we all know the tropes by now.
So this spoiler is here because I can not talk about the meta game the author plays without spoiling the very thing that makes this so enjoyable and unique. But all outright story spoilers will be contained in an additional layer of nested spoilers.

After the very engaging gripping opening, the pacing suffers a bit when the theme completely shifts to romance drama as the MC enters a kind of love triangle but not as the center but as the OW.
It takes until the climax for the pacing to pick up again.

A lot of these trope subversions threw me for a loop. On one hand, I appreciated how the author played with the meta context but on the other hand, it just made me uncomfortable for the MC to be in such a position. The love interest cheats with the MC on his fiancée.

Morality in this book is truly gray to the point where it made me surprisingly uncomfortable sometimes.
This also leads to probably the single biggest flaw in the book. Despite this moral ambiguity the author always shoehorns reason into the story to dislike characters that are about to be killed. Sometimes literally in the sentence before.
"Oh, by the way, that guy raped someone 3 years ago." *gets shot in the head*
Only unlikable people are allowed to be killed by the good guys. The punishment doesn't need to fit the crime though. You just have to dislike them first. This comes across as very forced and it also sometimes spoils the tension because you know there can only be one reason for the awkward addition.

That being said, in general, every time I recognized a classic stupid trope setup and was already preparing a disappointment rant in my head it turned out to be premature.

Ultimately, the ending was way sweeter and happier than I expected.


The second big weakness are the action scenes. Don't get me wrong, they are still much better than a lot of urban fantasy, and the most important part, the tension, was conveyed decently, but they failed in enabling me to imagine them properly. I rarely had a clear picture of who is where in relation to each other or the actual body movements and how they interacted.

While I feel like this book easily deserves 4 stars just because of its skillful play on tropes and just by the virtue of the sheer number of pitfalls the book deliberately avoided, my personal enjoyment was much closer to 3 stars and I don't really know why.
I think while there are very few bad clichées to be angry about the overall story was still just kind of meh. On a macro level, it's just another vampire romance despite the much better execution.
I would love to have read this after my 10th vampire romance and not after the 100th. ( )

Amazing Foray Into Vampire/Necromancer Lore

Loved, Loved, Loved!

I wish I picked this up sooner! Rhiannon's gift for storytelling had me sucked (heh) in from page one with the spunky Amaliya. Her journey through vampiredom is as awesome as I can imagine anyone writing it.

She has instantly become one of my favorite authors for her way with words, the way the scenes fill your mind, feel rich and alive with character themselves. And the characters - Cian and Amaliya are excellently penned, their own pasts, flaws, and inflections feeling true to life...or death in this case...carried along by a narrative that bounces from character to character, only enriching the ride taken to the end.

I've said enough - I need more! ( )

One of the things I liked most in this book is that it takes the distance from the way vampires are often portrayed nowadays: the romantic heroes that could do no harm (which they aren't!).
In this story vampires are BAD (some more than others) and believing them to be something different *cough*Samantha*cough* is just an illusion fated to be broken; as a matter of fact, only embracing their natural instinct in their quest for power, vampires can be really at peace with themselves (Cian).

Naturally "good" guys should still not go on a killing spree... ( )

3.5/5
Review soon. And let me just say that Grandma rocked! ;) ( )

Amaliya finally has her life on track. She's attending college (away from her horrible family), earning good grades, and trying to find her place in the world. Then, she has a coffee date with her attractive psychology professor and it all goes to hell. After awakening in a shallow grave, she goes on a bloodthirsty rampage on campus. The professor is actually a sadistic vampire who likes to create other vampires and see how they fare without providing any sort of guidance. Amaliya has no idea about her powers or what her limitations are, so she runs from her problems, leaving a wake of blood and death along the way. It's only a matter of time before others of her kind will take notice of her rather uncontrolled behavior and either help her out of her situation or kill her to preserve peace.

I've been meaning to read Pretty When She Dies for years, so I was pleasantly surprised to find it is a fun, fast paced book with no shortage of engaging characters and savory moments of horror. I liked Amaliya for the most part. She comes from an abusive home where everyone thinks she's worth nothing despite anything she's done to the contrary. She dyes her blonde hair black, has copious tattoos, and enjoys metal music. Her shtick is a little Hot Topic misunderstood goth for me, but I understand her drive to find her place and set herself apart from where she comes from. Her interests and aesthetic are different than most of the female protagonists out there, so it was interesting to read another perspective. The first half of the novel is setup and her own journey of self discovery. She knows absolutely nothing about being a vampire except that she needs to drink blood. Everything else is trial and error or simply stumbling upon discoveries. This part is also a genius way to show the vampires abilities without dedicated pages and pages to infodumping. The explanations and discoveries are integrated seamlessly into the text as Amaliya discovers all of this with the readers. Her strength and fire made me root for and admire her despite her missteps and occasionally rash decisions. She doesn't need Cian, the love interest, to come save her at every turn. I don't think there are many things I hate more than a strong woman made conveniently weak to have the strong man come in and save her.

The secondary characters are also quite memorable.. My favorite of them was Innocente, Amaliya's grandmother, ghost seer, and devout Catholic. Unlike so many vampire books out there, Innocente figures out Amaliya's affliction rather quickly and accepts it. Her granddaughter isn't very different from how she was before, so she isn't going to abandon her or condemn her. I loved her hilarious assumption that Amaliya needed to to be helped to the light to move on. When she finds out her granddaughter is in trouble, she gathers up all her portable religious artifacts to help. She isn't daunted by her age or her lack of strength, only driven by love and her sense of justice. I especially enjoyed that Innocente, the most unlikely part of their outcast group, is responsible for defeating the big bad of the novel. I want to read the rest of the series just to see more of this bad ass old lady.

My least favorite of the secondary characters are Samantha and Roberto, both part of Cian's circle of friends/followers. Samantha is a shrew of a woman who is engaged to Cian. From the moment she met Amaliya, she threw around terms like "whore" and "trash" simply based on her appearance. Everything she did was powered by saving her fiance from Amaliya and not much else. This annoyance is only secondary to Roberto, the two faced and centuries old servant to Cian. It didn't take much to get him to backstab his master and so many of his actions were disturbing throughout the novel. There were few things about the story that bothered me, namely the sheer number of coincidences that the plot relied on. Amaliya happened to run into Cian the first night in his territory and a similar situation happened with another vampire master. The first person Samantha whines to about her problems just so happens to be the son of a vampire hunter who made a pact with Cian. A few coincidences are fine, but it was coincidence after coincidence that made the plot a little too convenient.

I always enjoy Rhiannon Frater's writing. It flows so well that I read huge sections of the book in one sitting without realizing it. While there are moments of levity and humor, the dark horror elements are what I especially enjoyed. Frater knows how to disturb and when to let the blood flow. Although Pretty When She Dies isn't perfect, I enjoyed following Amaliya (and Innocente) through all of their adventures and I look forward to reading the other two books in the series. ( )