Book Review: Anna Dressed in Blood

Anna Dressed in Blood (Anna #1) 
By Kendare Blake
****

“Move, hunt, kill. Like lather, rinse, and repeat.” 
― Kendare Blake, Anna Dressed in Blood

From Goodreads: 

Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation: He kills the dead.

So did his father before him, until he was gruesomely murdered by a ghost he sought to kill. Now, armed with his father's mysterious and deadly athame, Cas travels the country with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat. They follow legends and local lore, destroy the murderous dead, and keep pesky things like the future and friends at bay.

Searching for a ghost the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood, Cas expects the usual: track, hunt, kill. What he finds instead is a girl entangled in curses and rage, a ghost like he's never faced before. She still wears the dress she wore on the day of her brutal murder in 1958: once white, now stained red and dripping with blood. Since her death, Anna has killed any and every person who has dared to step into the deserted Victorian she used to call home.

Yet she spares Cas's life.


From Me:

I read this book for this month's FYA Book Club selection. It was described to me as a cross between Supernatural and Scooby Doo, which I can totally see. Cas (come on, Cas?!) is very Dean-like, if Dean's mom lived instead of his dad, and he had no Sammy to hunt with him. Cas is cool. I like Cas. Anna's pretty cool, too, for a BAMF dead girl from the fifties. I love how she changed from ghost-girl to ghost-hulk depending on the situation - it made her a really fascinating character.

Blake pulls no punches when it comes to violence, like for reals. If you have a weak stomach and are easily squicked out, you may want to skim some of these sections. Things get pretty darn gruesome from time to time, and they're hard to stomach. But, as always with me, it's the horrible things that people do that cause me more trouble than the things the monsters do.

Great Halloween option for weenies like me who don't like straight-up horror. Spooky, creepy, eerie: yes; gross, violent: sometimes; scare me into putting the book in the freezer: no.