Review: Crusade (Crusade #1) by Nancy Holder, Debbie Viguie

Synopsis (via Goodreads):

For the past two years, Jenn has lived and trained at Spain’s Sacred Heart Academy Against the Cursed Ones. She is among the few who have pledged to defend humanity or die trying. But the vampires are gaining power, and the battle has only just begun.

Forced to return home after death takes a member of her family, Jenn discovers that San Francisco is now a vampire strong-hold. As a lone hunter apart from her team, Jenn is isolated — and at risk. She craves the company of her fighting partner, Antonio: his protection, his reassurance, his touch. But a relationship with Antonio comes with its own dangers, and the more they share of themselves, the more Jenn stands to lose.

Then Jenn is betrayed by one who was once bound to protect her, causing her to doubt all she had held as true. To survive, Jenn must find the courage to trust herself — and her heart.

My Thoughts:  I had a really tough time with this book.  It seemed like I'd just start getting involved in what was going on with one of the characters and suddenly we'd be kicking over to another scene with an entirely different character.  Frankly, the cast of this book is so big that it would take ages to swing back around to storyline A again and by the time it did I had almost forgotten what was going on.

Besides the scene jumping thing (which really threw me off my game, I'll have you know), I found that the large cast meant a lot of backstory.  It seemed that each of the main characters had a secret and the secret was told in a roundabout way.  I mean, I get that each of the hunters had become a hunter for big reasons, but wouldn't it have been nice to have one of them just pop in and be like, "Yo, I don't like vamps!  Show me some stake!"  I would have been down with that.  A nice, non-secretive member of their secret society.  Someone who was basically agenda free.  I guess Eriko kinda fit that bill, but we spent virtually no time with her (maybe because she was boring) so it was hard to tell.

Holgar was probably the one character I wish we had been able to get a little deeper into.  Jamie needed to show some growth and deal with his anger issues.  Skye's secrets seemed pretty damn big in the grand scheme of things and I kept wondering why she wouldn't tell anyone anything about it.  Jenn and Antonio... umm, I have surprisingly little to say about them.  There wasn't a whole lot of chemistry there and I never felt like they shared that great forbidden love.

I don't know.  It leaves a bad taste in my mouth when I have to force myself to finish a book.  Maybe I wasn't in the right frame of mind.  Maybe I should have left it for another day.  But I didn't.

So, while the book was okay, I don't have mad love for it.  It was just... okay.

More books by Nancy Holder
More books by Debbie Viguie

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