Review: Ana Dressed in Blood (Anna#1) by Kendare Blake

Author Info: website

Release Date: August 30th 2011
Publisher: Tor Teen
Pages: 316
Source: Purchased
Rating: ★★★★★

Just your average boy-meets-girl, girl-kills-people story...

Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation: He kills the dead.
So did his father before him, until his gruesome murder 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. Together they follow legends and local lore, trying to keep up with the murderous dead—keeping pesky things like the future and friends at bay.

When they arrive in a new town in search of a ghost the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood, Cas doesn’t expect anything outside of the ordinary: move, 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, but now stained red and dripping 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.

And she, for whatever reason, spares his life.

                                  

This book is awesome. I love it so much and I do not know if there is any word that can describe how much I love this book. The cover is absolutely beautiful, true that it gives you goosebumps but there is something there that draws my attention to it. I know the girl in dress is a typical YA cover but this one is somewhat feel different right.  Anyway I like the cover a lot that I decided to bought this book in the first place even though I am not fond with horror story.

This is my first ghost book so at the beginning I did not know how I was going to react about this: love it or hate it or somewhere in between. After finishing Ana dressed in blood, no let's me rephrase it: after the first few chapters, I knew for sure that this book had won me over. The story is so capturing that I did not want to put the book down. This one had climbed to my favorite stack of the year. So am I now a fan of scary book? No not really, this one I can take but if it's pure scary/horror like it can give you nightmare the rest of your life then my answer is no. I think I will stick with YA horror book because I think it's less scary than adult horror.  OK back to this wonderful book, even though this is a ghost hunter book I did not feel scare at all. True that I was on the edge the last few chapters but to feel scare to the point that I have to sleep with the light on then my answer is no. I even laughed a few times through out the book. Anyway this is a really good read, a little but mysterious about Ana's death at the beginning. But it was solved as the book ended, not a totally cliff hanger but still give you the urge to pick up the second book to see what will happen to Ana and will there be a chance Ana and Cas somehow be together? I know it's impossible to be together when Ana is already dead but just my little hope.