Title Blood Like Magic Author Liselle Sambury Cover Art --- Publisher Margaret K. McElderry - 2021 First Printing Margaret K. McElderry - 2021
	Title Blood Like Fate Author Liselle Sambury Cover Art --- Publisher --- First Printing ---
	Category Young Adult Warnings Blood, gore, death Main Characters Voya Thomas, Luc Main Elements Witches Website ---

Blood Like Magic

I read this book for free on the rivetedlit.come website. It was fun to read a second book that takes place in Toronto (last month the free book was A Dark and Hollow Star), this one having an interesting quirk in that not only does magic place a major role, but it also takes place in a future were people can get genetic manipulations to change the colour of their hair, or test out a new program to genetically match you with a perfect mate.

But while the SF parts play an important role, its really about the magic, an ancestor based one where at your first period (umm, even for males and since they don't have girl parts to conveniently let the blood out, it comes out of, well, everywhere else, ugh) a ceremony is performed where one ancestor will come forward to provide you with a task you must complete to determine what your power will be. Often its very easy, but Voya, she has to destroy her first true love. And if she fails the test, her entire family will lose their powers.

It doesn't help that Voya is incapable of making important decisions, and what could be more important than deciding on the person you are going to kill? Maybe that wouldn't be so hard for some of the other families that regularly boost their powers through death, but her family is clean, refusing to lower themselves to kill. But of course, even the other families don't go around killing those they love.

It would have been an interesting story except from the very first moment I realized that "first true love" is very vague and doesn't have to mean her first romantic love, especially as she hadn't had one of those yet and had only a month to complete the task. And the word "destroy" is also vague, you don't have to die to be destroyed. But Voya being stubborn refuses to spend even a moment looking beyond the obvious interpretation and that was extremely frustrating. And then you get a few hundred pages dealing with her indecision. There was great worldbuilding here, the magic, the future world, even the cooking and the dysfunctional family. But it got lost with Voya going in circles and that got annoying as the plot just sort of stalls there, even as she tries to unravel a mystery her family had kept hidden from the younger generation.

Personally I felt she made a mess of things, and I didn't even get the point, did she in the end finally do something decisive or just desperate? Now I can accept the mess part, she's young and in the real world we make mistakes, some of which we can't undo, with the best of intentions. And lets just say that her tasks was no simple one and the price ridiculously high, the stress would have gotten to anyone. But at 500 pages it was just too much angst for me, and it wasn't even over a boy! (Well, a little bit, but just a little bit. She never went about thinking she wasn't pretty/smart/thin/whatever enough for the boy). I'll probably read the sequel, to see what happens to Voya and Luc, but I'll be using the library.

BTW, if you want young adult Black LGBTQ protagonists that practice generational magic with a dysfunctional family, I much prefered Blood Debts by Terry J. Benton-Walker. The brother/sister pair made mistakes too, but at least they didn't spend the vast majority of the book not being able to decide what to do, but instead went out and got things done even when the adults didn't want them involved.