Cruel Illusions: the deliciously dark and addictive magical fantasy

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Monster Progenitor: Numerius is the first vampire. In ancient Rome, he was a magician who studied Blood Magic and discovered the ability to gain immortality. He discovered that when the Blood Magic is pushed to its brink and all blood within a magician is used, it results in an immortal body, albeit one that must now eternally consume the blood of others to keep itself going, and if it drinks a person dry of blood, it will turn that person into a vampire too. Graphic: Grief, Death, Injury/injury detail, Violence, Blood, Bullying, Death of parent, and Fire/Fire injury Dinner,” I yell up the stairs. I head straight for the kitchen and pull out a bowl of leftover spaghetti from the refrigerator and plop it in the microwave. I tap my fingers on the tiled countertop as I wait. And that complication only gets more intriguing as the book develops. As the consequences for power and ambition, for family secrets and revenge, only begin to bloom. Can we embrace power, discover our potential, without sinking into the very enemies we seek to destroy? For those who want a dangerous magical competition Cruel Illusions delivers. And for those who heard vampires and thought, “what?”, there are definitely these beloved members of the undead. While I wished that the vampires were explored a bit more, what else can you expect from a vampire hunting story? So recently I found a wonderful book called Vampires, Hearts and Other Dead Things so as you do when you love a book, you immediately look up what else the author has done... and I was so pleased to find another new book coming, and quite soon.

Cruel Illusions | Margie Fuston | 9781399711364 | NetGalley Cruel Illusions | Margie Fuston | 9781399711364 | NetGalley

I always stop for lost-pet flyers. I can’t stand the thought of animals out on the street when they have a home and a family waiting for them. This one’s a cat, and even though the paper’s yellowed from the sun and the ink’s smeared from the rain, I memorize the gray stripes and the name: Suzy. Ava spends her days rolling her eyes at her grody foster-whatevers and walking around at night with homemade stakes looking for vampires like some sort of middle school-aged Bleach fan. She’s invited out of nowhere to join a troupe of magicians who are also vampire hunters, and she accepts because her foster-whatever is a total drag and her parents were stage magicians. Also she’s 17 and she can run away to join the circus if she wants to, because she’s a grown-up, so screw you, Deb. You didn’t have to do that.” I mean this on two levels: (1) Foster-whatevers get money to feed and clothe us, but that doesn’t mean they actually have to buy us shit; (2) Deb wears a nauseating amount of pink. Her scrubs right now boast pink kittens. Pink kittens. I don’t want anything in that bag. It probably has sequins. I wish the book really chose what it wanted to be a lot sooner as it felt like the author was trying to achieve too many things in just one book that the plot was quite off pace hence it taking 50% to get worth reading!! The story reallt got going by the 75% mark and i feel like it would have paid off better to be a duology rather than a standalone? So the 2nd half of the story had more time to be fleshed out and the whole competition hunger games thing coulda been even more and the fast paced ending coulda been longer, I did enjoy the amount of blood and gore in this book a lot it was cool af!

My steps lighten as I hurry from the kitchen and dart up the stairs, dusting the banister with my hand as I go. Grazie a Netgalley, Hodder&Stoughton e Margie Fuston per avermi fornito questo libro in anteprima in cambio di una recensione onesta. ava has been determined to avenge her mother ever since she was killed by vampires. then, the perfect opportunity arises when a troupe of magicians invites her to join them…as long as she can make her way through a deadly competition. The story is about Ava, a young woman on the cusp of womanhood who has spent the last few years in foster homes after her mother was killed by vampires, though only she believes that. At seventeen, she’s taken in by a family that her brother fits in perfectly with, and she stumbles on a magic show that seems too good to be real. Which turns out to be true. Blood Magic: Since magic in magic users hums underneath the skin and is felt in the blood, blood letting helps to increase the abilities of its user. The more blood spilt from a person, the more powerful the spells. Eventually, it gets to a point where the magic users push themselves to the brink of death through blood letting and become immortal (their magician blood is all used up and instead they gain a hunger for the blood of others to replenish themselves, becoming vampires).

Cruel Illusions by Margie Fuston | Goodreads Cruel Illusions by Margie Fuston | Goodreads

A lot of infodumping later and we learn that real magic is a thing along with vampires, and magicians and vampires are pretty much the same thing or come from the same thing because their magic is in their BLOOD but the vampires are different because they’re vampires. It doesn’t really make much sense, but that’s okay, because neither does the rest of the book. Don’t think too hard about it, just focus on the fact that Xander doesn’t have a shirt. It’s just not there. I cannot overstate this, Xander is shirtless.

The story is about Ava, a young woman who spent the last few years in foster families after her mother was killed by vampires, even if only she believes it. At seventeen, she is greeted by a family that her brother fits in perfectly, and stumbles upon a magic show that seems too good to be real. And that magic is real!

Cruel Illusions by Margie Fuston - Utopia State of Mind Review: Cruel Illusions by Margie Fuston - Utopia State of Mind

So I’m just gonna say the plot was boring. The magic system felt cheap. I don’t know how else to put it. Cruel Illusions is one of those books which consistently surprises you. There’s vampires and magic, family secrets and revenge. The magic was fascinating to me because it merges illusion magic with this idea of receiving our magic from the applause of others. People almost ‘feed’ our magic. This becomes a very interesting juxtaposition with the vampires. They obviously feed off the blood of others. Immediately, Cruel Illusions begins to complicate this dynamic. Immortal Procreation Clause: Magicans who take the immortality spell cannot have children, because their bodies are frozen at the age that the spell was cast. Hence, the biological functions required for conception and pregnancy will not occur.I can accept, just, that maybe Ava is pushing Deb (and all that surrounds her) away because she’s too scared to be comfortable for fear of it being torn away from either her or her brother, a defence mechanism for being in the foster system, type response, if it wasn’t for the… The troupe is in a competition to win some magic BLOOD jewellery that makes their new troupe member immortal. Or something like that. I forget. Also if they lose one of their members has to leave the troupe forever. Ava thinks this sounds very logical and not at all like she’s missing vital information, and decides to join despite the fact all she knows how to do is flip a quarter around. The competition takes place in a big mansion that no else in town seems to have noticed exists. Before the main events of the book, Vampire Hunter Roman met a vampiress turned against her will who was dying, and he helped her by letting her feed off him. The two became lovers for a time afterwards. Caraval meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer in this “beguiling” ( Publishers Weekly, starred review) young adult fantasy about a girl who makes a deal with a magical secret society to enter a potentially deadly competition for the chance to avenge her mother’s death. La storia parla di Ava, una giovane donna che ha trascorso gli ultimi anni in famiglie affidatarie dopo che sua madre è stata uccisa dai vampiri, anche se solo lei lo crede. A diciassette anni, viene accolta da una famiglia in cui suo fratello si adatta perfettamente, e si imbatte in uno spettacolo di magia che sembra troppo bello per essere reale. Infatti quella magia è reale!