Anna Dressed In Blood by Kendare Blake [book review]

Book: Anna Dressed in Blood

Author: Kendare Blake

Published: October 17, 2011

Publisher: Tor Teen

Pages: 316

Genre: YA Horror

Setting: Thunder Bay, Ontario

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Hey everyone and welcome to Owl Book World. Today I’m writing a review for Anna Dressed in Blood. I’m sure if you’re here then you’ve heard of this book before! Let me know in the comments where you heard the book from!

About Anna Dressed in Blood:

Anna Dressed In Blood follows Cas Lowood. Cas has an unusual gift that not many people know about. For a living, he kills the dead. His father did the same thing until he was murdered by a ghost. No he and his witchy mother along with the ghost sniffing cat travel the country to kill murderous ghosts. When it’s time to work on a new case the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood. He expects it to be the same as usual track, hunt, kill, and then leave. But Ana is different. She’s cursed and filled with rage. Everyone that comes in her proximity she kills. She kills everyone but Cas.

What I thought

I’ve been seeing Anna Dressed In Blood a lot and how quite a few people enjoyed it. On top of that, it’s a YA Horror book and I love reading YA Horror Books. So. thankfully I managed to get the audiobook through my library.

The Characters

So I don’t know how I feel about Cas. To me, he’s really lacking depth or any ooph. I’m not fully sure if it was his character or how the story was written. But I did think Anna was awesome. She’s strong. Much stronger than any ghost Cas has ever encountered. I love how strong she is and how can only control herself around certain people and is violent around others.

Cas doesn’t have any friends because they move around so much. But being here he attracts friends like bees in honey and they want help with the ghost hunting. He wants to ditch them because they will be leaving soon. I think it’s awesome he’s able to find some of the best friends he could ask for without even trying.

The Plot

The premise of this story seems really good but I feel like it’s lacking. The writing seems a little mediocre to me. There’s no mystery to what happens next which is what I was expecting when I requested this book. Pretty much everything is laid out for you other than if they’re going to make it. The lack of mystery makes the story really slow. I just wish there was more action or spookiness to the story since this is considered horror. It really is lacking in the actual horror department.

On the plus side, I can see a lot of boys enjoying the story since the main character is a boy. I don’t know if I just haven’t really been looking much or what but it does seem like a lot of YA books have female main characters. Nothing wrong with that but I do feel like most boys (especially ones who don’t read a lot in the first place) would want to read books with a male character until they start liking books a little more!

If you enjoy books like this then you might also like my list of YA horror books.