For Blood & Glory

Wonderful start and character development with a rushed ending

For Blood & Glory starts off with a bang as a group of teenagers find a pregnant woman in the water. This woman is taken to a hospital and treated, though, through the eyes of a nurse, things seem a little wonky with her test results as well as how the other professionals treat the poor woman. Fast-forward fifteen years and we're following the woman's daughter, Sefira, and her life as a highschooler living in a new town with her adopted family and having to rebuild relationships and status. However, this is no simple coming-of-age story, for Sefira starts to discover that there is more to her and her birth family than meets the eye.

I thoroughly enjoyed the variety of the characters and how each of them had a distinct personality and voice, even the minor characters such as Sefira's friends. I've read other books were even main characters all seem to blend together into one cohesive being that has the same voice. One of my favorite characters is Blythe, who is introduced in about halfway through. There is definitely no one else like her and she has a unique way of handling various situations.

A couple of times during the book there were some world/plot-specific words thrown around that I didn't quite understand. An explanation of these words seemed to be missing, or at least I must have missed it. Also, toward the end of the book, there was a large information dump of the more supernatural facets of the world. A mean a large information dump. But even then, it left more questions rather than answers. Granted, I'm intrigued to see what happens next in the sequel, which is good. Yet, I don't think that it really closed the chapter on this book very well.

Overall, I really liked it For Blood & Glory and I'm looking forward to seeing more from Hendricks.