Sips of Blood

Rating:
Summary: Painful.
Review: A vampire novel with the Marquis de Sade as one of the principal characters sounded interesting. I expected it to have a lot of sadistic sex, and it did. Soon, however, I got tired of the sadistic sex and started looking for the plot. After one-hundred and fifty pages, I was still looking. The characters here are all flat and stereotypical. Sade and his mother-in-law Marie are true to the historical accounts of them, but other than the fact that they hate each other and like to inflict pain on others, there wasn't really much to their characters. I also have to take issue with the description of Sade as attractive. I've seen pictures of him, and he was not at all good-looking. Liliana Plissay, Sade's neice, is a more interesting character, but there's not much more to her than the good-vampire-who-wants-to-be-human-again stereotype, and there's not enough of her story to drive the novel. I did like the zombie vampires, though. That was an interesting concept that I wish Mitchell had explored further. To sum up, this book was so bad that I started to wonder if Mitchell herself was a sadist, and this was her idea of a joke. As I see that there is now a sequel to this travesty of a vampire novel, I'm beginning to think that explanation more and more likely.

Rating:
Summary: Painful.
Review: A vampire novel with the Marquis de Sade as one of the principal characters sounded interesting. I expected it to have a lot of sadistic sex, and it did. Soon, however, I got tired of the sadistic sex and started looking for the plot. After one-hundred and fifty pages, I was still looking. The characters here are all flat and stereotypical. Sade and his mother-in-law Marie are true to the historical accounts of them, but other than the fact that they hate each other and like to inflict pain on others, there wasn't really much to their characters. I also have to take issue with the description of Sade as attractive. I've seen pictures of him, and he was not at all good-looking. Liliana Plissay, Sade's neice, is a more interesting character, but there's not much more to her than the good-vampire-who-wants-to-be-human-again stereotype, and there's not enough of her story to drive the novel. I did like the zombie vampires, though. That was an interesting concept that I wish Mitchell had explored further. To sum up, this book was so bad that I started to wonder if Mitchell herself was a sadist, and this was her idea of a joke. As I see that there is now a sequel to this travesty of a vampire novel, I'm beginning to think that explanation more and more likely.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting Characters!
Review: Although the book was filled with interesting characters, it needed more ...ummm... something. I do not know what, but it lacked something. I could not put the book down and I did not want it to end. The characters intrigued me, but it comes to a closing way too fast. Yes, that was it... the end ... just came too abruptly. It was building up then THE END! It left me wanting MORE!

Rating:
Summary: UNIQUE TWIST ON THE MARQUIS DE SADE LEGACY
Review: Fans of Mitchell's first novel DRAWN TO THE GRAVE are definitly in for a shock with this one. Part vampire tale, part S&M saga, this story deals with the descendants of the Marquis de Sade. Even the most ardent vampire fans may be shocked by some of the intense bondage and torture scenes. Not as spooky as DRAWN, but a very original take on the Marquis de Sade, with some obscure vampiric night zombies tossed in for good measure. Mitchell has managed to once again pull off an original novel.....though maybe a bit too perverse for your average horror fan.

Rating:
Summary: Sex, Love and Vampires
Review: Flesh and blood mix in this explicit tale of vampires and their victems. I expected an historical novel of vampires much like the Saint Germain and Dracula's wives series written by Chelsea Quinn Yarbo instead I found a moderm story filled with disfunctional humans and wickedly sensual vampires. Louis Sade is what you would expect vicious and controling. His mother in law is straight from hell and his lovely niece is so sad and lonely. She breaks your heart. The character development is the strength of this novel. The plot takes a while to come together. I would highly recommend this to adult vampire horror fans but I would not suggest it for teens.

Rating:
Summary: sips of blah
Review: How did this book win an award? The concept is high but the end result is low low low. The characters have no character, they are merely one-note johnnies: the Marquis is handsome & bad, his mother-in-law is domineering & bad, his niece is beautiful & good, the housekeeper's daughter is a ditzy teenager, the old man is a curmugeon, etc. The plot can only be described as feeble & seems to be there only as an excuse to describe the set pieces of (bad) s&m.The style is non-existent, the grammar & spelling are atrocious (the past tense of shine is "shone", by the way)and surely after 150 years the divine Marquis would have learned to use the English word for "dog", the French of which is inserted awkwardly & frequently along with a lot of other French words, just to remind us the French characters are from France. There seems to be a subgenre of s&m/vampire books; I keep hoping to find one of them that really works. I guess I'll keep looking; in the meantime, I'll just keep rereading Philosophy in the Bedroom. I recommend the author do the same.

Rating:
Summary: A surprising shock
Review: I found this book interesting in a very individual manner. The plot was somewhat weak leaving the reader yearning for more vampire aspects instead of S&M. The new view of the Marquis de Sade was worth reading. But in my view,this book sends you running back to the staples of vampire literature like Bram Stroker's Dracula and Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles.

Rating:
Summary: Brain Candy at its finest!
Review: I LOVE IT! I could not put it down, it sucked me in from cover to cover. The characters are very well developed in this first book of a series, however, make sure you read this one first or the others (Quenched and Cathedral of Vampires) will make no sense to you at all. Kudos to angel's and algerina's posted reviews, I could not describe the book better myself.

Rating:
Summary: Brain Candy at its finest!
Review: I LOVE IT! I could not put it down, it sucked me in from cover to cover. The characters are very well developed in this first book of a series, however, make sure you read this one first or the others (Quenched and Cathedral of Vampires) will make no sense to you at all. Kudos to angel's and algerina's posted reviews, I could not describe the book better myself.

Rating:
Summary: that's it?
Review: I was drawn in by the characters and plot, but the ending left me cold... It came to it's conclusion too suddenly for my tastes, I thought there would be a few more pages to it.