Audiobook Review: Anna Dressed in Blood

Anna Dressed in Blood (Anna, 1) by Kendare Blake, narrated by August Ross, 2011. 8.7 hours. Published by AudioGo. Source: YA Audio Sync.

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.

First Sentence:

The grease-slicked hair is a dead giveaway---no pun intended.

Story

I've been wanting to read/listen to Anna Dressed in Blood for quite sometime. Partly because I've heard really good things about it, but mainly because it looked like a good book.

I like to be pulled into the lives of the characters and the world in which they reside when I read a book, and Anna Dressed in Blood did exactly that. From the very beginning the author's writing pulled me in and made me need to know what had happened in the pats of the characters that brought them to the stage where the were in the book and what would befall them throughout the rest of it.

If you are looking for a gruesome read, than look no further because Anna Dressed in Blood is perhaps one of the creepiest books I have listened to.  While creepy, I loved that the true focus of the book was the characters and how their stories intertwined with each other, from Cas and his ability to sends ghosts on, to Anna with her tragic past. It was just one well rounded book that has both the story-line writing to be something that will linger on long after the last bit of book consumed.

Cas, was one hard character to get a bead on because he believed that sending spirits on was his calling, and yet he seemed to struggle with what he did at times.
Anna was the character I liked the most. Sure being a murderess ghosts is not good, but I loved her story and how she was so much more than her legend and that underneath the scary exterior she was a strong, caring young girl. Her story is the one that will stick with me because she wanted a better life and it was cut short by the most shocking of villains...although I did guess early on who offed her.

What I found myself enjoying the most out Anna Dressed in Blood would have to be that this book was pretty creepy. Now, while it wasn't so scary that I won't be sleeping with the lights out, I thought that Ms Blake did one fantastic job of setting the stage for a truly nightmarish read. I love horror stories especially when done right and Anna hit the scary jack-pot keeping my attention on the story and not what I was supposed to be working on.

Even though I seriously enjoyed Anna Dressed in Blood and how different it was from other horror books, I was disappointed that there was so much swearing. There wasn't just swearing in this book, it was the f-word and some of the other stronger swears. I just have a hard time with swearing in the books I read since I don't swear myself. I have found that any book I read that has an excessive amount of swearing breaks my reading/listening mood and throws me out of the story. So, if you're not a fan of swearing of would caution you that this is not exactly a language clean read...although they swearing is scattered throughout and not every other sentence.

Narration

 Y'all look another male narrated audiobook and y'all know that these ones can be a bit hit and miss with me.    So, did August Ross, the narrator of Anna Dressed in Blood, impress me or just me a meh feeling, well that is what we are about to find out. 

On a whole I enjoyed his narration of this audiobook and liked that he gave the characters different voices. Which made it so much easier to differentiate between all the male characters in the book. While I did like that each of the characters sounded different, a few of them sounded a little odd. o_O  

What I liked most about Ross's narration of Anna Dressed in Blood would have to Anna herself. Surprisingly enough, he did a pretty good job with her and her Finnish accent. I really enjoyed the way he narrated her and different 

While I did enjoy the audiobook of Anna Dressed in Blood and liked August Ross' narration, I have just one complaint. I did not like the way he read Carmel, nit that I was fond of the character to begin with, but I just felt like he read her part wrong because she sounded kind of like a whiny snob. Which is weird because she was supposed to be pretty down to earth.
Thus continues my dislike of male narrators reading female characters. It just tends to not sound right, of course sometimes female readers do really bad when it comes to voicing male characters, too.

Final Verdict: Anna Dressed in Blood is intensely creepy and fast paced.

Anna Dressed in Blood earns 4 out of 5 pineapples