The Blood Guard by Carter Roy wasn’t anything like what I’d expected.
The main character Ronan may be a teenager who’s stumbled across a world of swords and sorcery and automatic weapons, but this is not one of those stories where he turns out to be some kind of “chosen one” or demigod. Not even close.
He’s accidentally found the Blood Guard, a league of (almost) indestructible soldiers who could kill you with a cafeteria tray as easily as a knife. They defend the fate of the world from darkness, but they’re not chosen ones either. Not really anyway.
The chosen ones are thirty-six people scattered across the planet, and they have no idea what they are. They’re ordinary, usually uninteresting, and they live their normal little lives without ever knowing that their existence somehow makes the world a better place.
The bad guys don’t care about any of that, of course. They have their reasons for wanting to slaughter every one of them, and that’s why the Blood Guard exists.
In some ways the book reads like a typical young-adult novel: the main characters are kids, the story’s straightforward, and the worst of the violence and death happens “off-camera.”
The writing style, though, would appeal to a lot of adults. I was constantly delighted at how well Carter Roy can write an internal monologue. Every time we see what Ronan’s thinking it’s cleverly worded, and sounds exactly the way real people talk.
Honestly, there were times I thought his character “voice” was better than Percy Jackson, who sometimes sounds a little unrealistic to me. (But only sometimes. I still love the Percy Jackson books, please don’t send the harpies after me.)
I liked that in the very first chapter we find out that Ronan’s mom is a member of the Blood Guard; instead of the main character having to keep his destiny a secret from his family, it turns out the secret badass is his mother.
A lot of the other characters are very fun, especially Dawkins: he’s an unapologetic pickpocket, eats constantly, and gets probably the best lines of anybody in the whole book.
Oh, and I almost forgot: please put me out if I catch fire.
I also liked how surprisingly chilling the book could get. It’s explained to Ronan that each of the thirty-six people they defend live normal human lifespans, and when one dies another one is born. But if they’re murdered, the world gets a little darker. The evil society that hunts them has only ever managed to kill five at one time. It didn’t destroy the world, but it did cause World War Two. So killing more than that would be, to put it lightly, bad.
The whole book caught me by surprise. I hadn’t heard any buzz about it, and I somehow assumed it was going to be something like a cheesy “Percy Jackson meets Spy Kids” story.
Wrong. The writing is great, the story itself holds up very well, and nobody turns out to have immortal parents.
His mom really is a badass though.