The Progeny/Firstborn

The Progeny/Firstborn (Descendants of the House of Bathory #1-2)
By: Tosca Lee

This is a great duology! I would recommend reading them back to back. I waited awhile before I was able to read Firstborn and it took a bit to remember all the details from The Progeny so I don’t think I appreciated some of the connections as much as I would have had the first book been on the forefront of my mind.

These are fast-paced and take some unexpected turns. And they have a resolved ending which I appreciate. I love books that incorporate history and I thought she did a good job of weaving the legend into the story.

Tosca Lee did incredible research and preparation for this story (look up her related Pinterest board with all kinds of pictures of the actual places and things used in the story).

Elizabeth Bathory was a Hungarian countess who is also said to be one of the most prolific female serial killers. If the legend is to be true, she tortured and murdered hundreds of young girls. Some rumors indicate it was to bathe in and drink their blood, but there is no evidence to this effect. Others pose that none of these claims are true and that others who stood to benefit from her demise made it all up and framed her. We’ll never know.

Lee has taken this mysterious and gruesome backstory and turned it into a modern day ‘war.’ In this world, the descendants of the house of Bathory are said to have special powers. Another lineage of people are hunter—seeking to destroy all of The Blood Countess’s supposedly dangerous offspring. The hunters have forced the progeny underground. Two 400-years-long warring secret societies.

Meet our protagonist: Emily Jacobs. Fresh from a memory-wipe. But her past cannot be escaped. Though she doesn’t know it yet, she is a descendant of Elizabeth Bathory, serial killer.

Even though her past self wrote her a letter telling her: there’s a reason you wiped your memory, her past cannot be escaped. She is almost immediately thrust into a dangerous world, trying to make sense of it all and her role in it. Who can she trust and how does she use her powers for good?

I think my one, I guess, 'question' with the storyline is that the monk had told her she needed to figure out how to use her powers better or they would destroy her. That the more she acts out of desperation, the more it will cost her. We saw that in her nosebleeds and such as she tried to do larger tasks. But even the event at the end seemed out of desperation and it didn’t seem to affect her, and if it wasn’t out of desperation we see only a small glimpse of the process it took to get to this point. I feel like there was a piece missing to that aspect of her story, something that didn’t quite come to fruition. But I digress.

Between the suspense, the creativity in character/setting, and the historical threads, this book had a lot of great elements. I would highly recommend this. And really anything Tosca Lee writes.

Sidenote: if you really enjoy the Bathory folklore, consider reading Castle Shade, a Sherlock Holmes rendition.