REVIEW: Blood of My Blood (book) by Barry Lyga

Blood of My Blood is the last book in Barry Lyga's I Hunt Killers trilogy. It's a YA thriller. I got my copy via interlibrary loan.

This review contains major spoilers for the previous book. If you haven't read it and plan to, stop reading right here.

Review:

Blood of My Blood picks up right where Game left off, which means it starts on a nerve-wracking note and just ramps up the tension from there. Howie is bleeding out on the floor of Jazz's home, after potentially accidentally killing Jazz's grandmother. Connie is in Billy's clutches. And Jazz is in a storage unit with a bunch of dead bodies, doomed to die of blood loss, dehydration, or infection if no one finds him.

I read most of this book over the course of two days, because I needed to find out what would happen to the characters and whether they'd be okay. In the previous books, the odds always seemed pretty good that Jazz, Connie, and Howie would survive. But this was the final book in the trilogy. Would Lyga let them live? Was a "good" ending even possible for Jazz? I hoped so, but I definitely didn't know for sure. In fact, I worried about these characters so much that I broke down at one point and read the last page of the book. I don't recommend that, by the way - it spoils a pretty major revelation.

Thinking about it now, the whole "Crow King" aspect was difficult to believe. These were largely not the sort of people who'd let one individual have any sort of power over them or knowledge about them. It was even more difficult to believe that they'd accept that particular Crow King.

However, this book and its characters had such a tight hold on me that it didn't matter whether that stuff was believable or not. I just needed to see how things were going to turn out, even if it was awful and bloody.

Weirdly, I thought this book was actually far less gory than the previous one. Less gory, but still absolutely horrific. I felt so bad for Jazz - major content warnings for child abuse.

The "5 years later" epilogue almost felt like a fairy tale after everything that came before it, or maybe a dream one of the characters was having. That said, I'm glad Lyga included it. It gave some closure and reassurance, of a sort. I'll miss these characters.