The Book of Blood and Shadowby Robin Wasserman

It was like a nightmare, but there was no waking up.When the night began, Nora had two best friends and a boyfriend she adored. When it ended, she had nothing but blood on her hands. Chris was dead. Adriane couldn’t speak. And Max, Nora’s sweet, smart, soft-spoken Prince Charming, was gone. He was also—according to the police, according to her parents, according to everyone—a murderer.Desperate to prove his innocence, Nora’s determined to follow the trail of blood, no matter where it leads. But Chris’s murder is just one piece in a puzzle that spans continents and centuries. Solving it may be the only way she can save her own life. (goodreads.com)

In a sea of seemingly similar YA books these days, The Book of Blood and Shadow stands out with it's Outside of the Paranormal Box-ness. I imagine this is what The Da Vinci Code would be like if it was written for teens. I say this never having read The Da Vinci Code but knowing it has something to do with secret societies, conspiracies, codes and, I think, religion?This here is a conspiracy-oriented mystery that has latin and religious ties and a trip to Prague (why are all the books I have been reading this year set in Prague?) and murder and more! It's a pretty meaty book, too. Not something you can read in just a handful of hours. At least I couldn't.The one thing that I didn't like was how slow the book felt at the beginning. By the second part of the book the adventure/mystery had picked up and things went a little faster. It was really the third and final part of the book that kept me gripped to my seat and turning the pages though. Each section of the book got just that much better. It truly irked me that I had about 20 pages to go before I went away for the weekend and didn't want to pack this book since I was already taking two others AND was out of space in my backpack. I would have finished this book way before I did Poison Heart and Forgotten but, sadly, I left it behind.I'm happy that Robin Wasserman stepped outside of the box to write a teen novel that didn't have vampires, werewolves or any other of the normal supernatural creatures. Although some of the plot was slightly cliché and I'd pretty much guessed the ending before the middle of the book, I still enjoyed the story immensely.Often a lot of what would normally bug me in other books can be easily overlooked if you just write well enough to keep me entertained. This is what happened with The Book of Blood and Shadow. I truly enjoyed the reading experience (even the slow start) and was having a lot of fun rushing through the streets of Prague with Nora, Adriane and Eli. I really liked Eli in fact. He made me laugh and was a much more likable male character than either Chris or Max. I never liked Max.