DiDonovan

Sheft is an eighteen-year-old who harbors a deadly secret: his blood, when shed, attracts a terrifying entity that threatens his small village. Convinced that he is a danger to all around him, Sheft keeps himself apart. So when he falls in love, it's an unexpected (and in some ways unwanted) experience that he believes can only lead to tragedy.

That's the basic gist of Blood Seed. Veronica Dale could easily have stopped here, focusing on the developing romance and Sheft's struggle to break his bonds of isolation. But events move in a different, more complex direction and love serves only as the starting point for a journey that leads Sheft to find out more about his role as a strange attractor to underlying supernatural forces at work in his world.

It's difficult to categorize Blood Seed - and that is part of its attraction. In a book world replete with formula genre reads, Blood Seed offers up something different: a potent mix of fantasy, romance, intrigue, and a believable protagonist whose current dilemma is just the beginning of his evolutionary process.

Descriptions of how Sheft balances the passions and promises of love while struggling with a seemingly invincible curse are compelling and poignant, as are those of Mariat's increasing and unbreakable involvement in his life. They drive the underlying fantasy and horror elements in the story.

With Blood Seed holding the power to attract so many different genre readers with its fantasy, romance, supernatural, and horror elements, it's a challenge to neatly categorize its audience. Readers journey through a strange land in Sheft's footsteps, partake of his agonies and ecstasies, and ultimately revel at his tenacity and strengths.

Is there a curse, or isn't there? Can what is broken be healed? And will the process of discovery change Mariat's own life? Certainly it's changed Sheft's world, which moves from the hidden powers of an isolated loner to something much greater. What each will become, and the events that take place in the eighteenth year of Sheft's life, provides an action-packed saga that carries readers on an evocative journey that holds no pat ending.

Fans of genre crossovers who appreciate romance, powerful protagonists, and coming-of-age reads will relish a touch of the unexpected in the complex world explored in Blood Seed, the first book of the four-book series Coin of Rulve.