Review: Blood Bonds by Adrienne Wilder

Blood Bonds
(City of Dragons, #1)
By: Adrienne Wilder
Publisher: Gray Zone Publishing
Published: Feb. 16, 2012
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Rating:

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Living with Humans is never easy. They don’t do scent exchange, they don’t lick palms, and they have this thing called “personal space”.

As the first and only Kin Agent for the Center of Folk and Kin Relations, Haley Night’s job is to help keep the public safe by helping keep the peace. But after an interview with serial man-eater Niles Fury goes terribly wrong, Haley finds herself face-to-face with a plot to destroy her species–genocide.

With the help from her best friend and partner Farley, she sets off on a race against time to stop a madman’s plot to destroy Kin. It’s a journey that will put to the test everything she thought she knew: Kin have no God, survive at all costs, and love is only a Human emotion.

Welcome to Atlanta, Georgia… City of Dragons…

This is a whole new take on Dragons and I thought it was perfect. Most of the dragonkin books I’ve read, the dragons are short tempered but seem domesticated. Adrienne Wilder takes a whole different spin on them though that was extremely interesting. The dragons don’t act, look or behave like humans. Their way of greeting is by licking palms. Since there are very few Females every Male that Haley comes across waits for permission to touch her and when it is granted they lick her palm and always try to keep physical contact with her via skin to skin touch, which can look a little perverted to human officers when she is questioning someone in the Tank and he’s licking her calf. Not only is the behavior different from what I have normally read but the Kin must feed on each other by not only drinking blood but eating each others flesh to feed off of the metaphysical energy. However, the lower Kin on the food chain end up being the Food and Haley’s best friend Farley just so happens to be Food. He learned immediately after hatching that because he was the smallest and weakest he had to fully submit to all Dominants in order to stay alive. The whole concept Wilder has on the dragonkin is so gritty and feral that you never for a second forget that you are reading a book about dragonkin.

Haley was raised by a human and therefor imprinted on humans. She acts and looks more like a human than her own kind. The only thing that gives away her true identity is the nevus (Kin mark) on her neck that no one see’s. So a lot of humans mistake her for their own. She doesn’t have the same mentality as the rest of her Kin. She doesn’t view herself above others, she doesn’t have a hunger for human flesh (which is illegal) and she doesn’t plan on marking any Males as her’s.

There are a lot of crazy terms in this book and the glossary in the front definitely helps with that. I found myself flipping to the glossary a lot to look up meanings. Was it distracting? A little, but the fact that the Kin have their own language made the story more authentic as well. I really did enjoy this story and look forward to reading the next book in the series.

“So far he’s been about as helpful as a paper cut.”