One Blood Ruby by Melissa Marr – Review

Published: February 28, 2017

Publisher: HarperCollins

Series: Seven Black Diamonds #2

Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy

Pages: 368 (Hardcover)

My Rating: 2.5/5.0

Synopsis:

Who can end the war between humans and the fae?

Now that Lilywhite Abernathy is the heir to the Hidden Lands, everything is about to change.

The Queen of Blood and Rage wants Lily to help broker peace with the human world, but Lily knows that harmony won’t come easily. After decades of waging war on the humans, who cost the queen her firstborn daughter, the fae are struggling to accept Lily, a half-human monarch. And the humans, while no match against faery affinities, will hardly agree to the queen’s détente without resistance.

Lily wants to be a fair ruler but fears having to abandon the life she’s known to do so. Now that she and Creed are more than just fellow Black Diamonds—operatives for the queen—her priorities have shifted. But her worries about assuming the throne are derailed when it becomes clear that someone—or some fae—is masterminding violent attacks to discourage peace.

In this follow-up to Melissa Marr’s Seven Black Diamonds, Lily and her friends are forced to reckon with the truth of their own parentage and to protect one of their own, no matter what—or who—comes between them.

I’m going to keep this review short and sweet. I recently read Seven Black Diamonds as part of an effort to clean up my backlisted TBR and it was a light, casual read. You can check out my review for it here. The series was just a duology so I made the time to read One Blood Ruby shortly afterward to wrap things up.

One Blood Ruby was more of the same thing I got in the first book – cheesy YA romance (no love triangle, thank goodness), a bit of eco-consciousness, and a hefty dose of bad faeries. And I mean bad in both ways – they’re dangerous “bad” and stereotypically YA “bad”. The plot wasn’t awful, but it just didn’t do much for me. LilyDark (WHY did her name have to change???) is revealed as the heir to the Faerie throne, her aunt Eilidh seems to be about to lose herself to the elements, and the other Diamonds have their own dramas going on.

If I was to recommend a Melissa Marr series it would not be this one. Go read the Wicked Lovely series, it’s way cooler and remains one of my favorite YA series even after re-reading it with a more mature taste in books.