As a fan of the Vampire Academy series, I was ecstatic to find out about halfway through it that there was a spinoff series as well... until I found out that Sydney Sage was the protagonist. My enthusiasm dropped, which was made even worse when I found out Adrian was in it as well. Adrian is my favorite character and I love him to pieces, but I was wary in Spirit Bound when Sydney said Adrian was attractive for a Moroi. That set off warning bells in my head, since some of my favorite male characters get ruined by love, especially when it's a girl they do NOT mesh with (in my opinion). (Examples are Elijah from The Vampire Diaries/The Originals, Lincoln Lee from Fringe, and of course, Adrian Ivashkov). 
 Sydney is about as interesting as listening to an audio textbook (if you like that sort of thing, that's cool, but I most definitely do not). I wasn't expecting her to be Rose 2.0, especially after all her cameos in Vampire Academy, but dear god, woman, grow a little backbone! She's a passive person who lets everyone walk all over her (Keith, Adrian, Mrs. Terwillinger) and silently fumes when they do so but doesn't really act on it. (Except yelling at Adrian, she's always doing that.) I get that she's an Alchemist and they have all this fear and paranoia about the Moroi and dhampirs, but it's just so extreme it's laughable. Her reaction to Jill's water magic is downright comedic, like the water had become acidic all of a sudden, and she has a panic attack about Adrian's spirit dreams and his trying to help her by healing, as if the magic changed her and turned her into something other than human. She doesn't want to drink a can of diet cola in a Moroi house because she thinks it's been tainted somehow, then changes her mind with the reasoning "It was sealed and looked like it had come straight from a human grocery store, not some vampiric cauldron." Sigh, really, Sydney? It's annoying when she claims she's not smart, which is not her being humble but her having self-esteem issues. She has body image issues as well; she throws a fit at being given a size four uniform and decides to starve herself even though she's already borderline anorexic. Not all size twos are the same throughout the world, Sydney, and they're irrelevant anyway, just check your measurements if you're that concerned about it. Her social skills are ridiculous and I think she only made friends because they're amused by the weird stuff that comes out of her mouth. She also has zero understanding of feelings and relationships (I swear if you'd asked pre-Indigo Spell Sydney to tell you what love is she'd draw you a scientific diagram) as made clear by her decision not to talk to Jill about Micah and instead run to Adrian and try to set her up with Lee. No wonder Jill was so peeved. Even though I didn't like every little thing Rose did, I could accept that she acted like an impulsive idiot sometimes because she's a teenager. I'm a little harder on Sydney because even though they're the same age, Sydney totes around an adult-like superiority and with her so-called super smarts she shouldn't act like such a moron. Basically, I do not like Sydney; I didn't like her in VA, and I didn't like her here. The only reason I read (and continue to read, since Ruby Circle isn't out yet) the Bloodlines series is because of Adrian, even though he's been ruined too. (Which is a rant for another review). 
 Although the book is littered with hints and references to the (extremely flimsy) conflict, it's overshadowed by other things that I'll get into next. First, the Nevermore tattoos. Did anyone else figure out from the get-go that Keith was behind it? Sydney hates him so obviously he wasn't going to make it to book 2, which meant he'd be made a villain. I'm not backing Keith since I didn't like him (as we weren't supposed to, obviously), but the whole "The heroine doesn't like him/her so they must be a villain" thing is so overdone. The whole plot fell flat and seemed hollow, in any case; Sydney's half-assed investigation that she only pulled off with Adrian's help and that was the end of it. Yawn. Let's also mention that she straight up asked Keith about the tattoos, which was a stupid idea. Yes, good one Sydney, there's knock off Alchemist tattoos in Palm Springs and you ask the only Alchemist (that you loathe and know has no morals) in the area what he knows about them. Duh. 
 There's also the whole vampire hunters plot, which turns out not to be hunters at all. I'll admit I didn't know that it was really Lee and he used to be Strigoi (although another run through the book showed that there were some extremely subtle mentions to this; how he was worrying about grey hair, how he thought he should be able to fix things without tools, how he used to be better at mini golf, that sort of stuff. Nothing really memorable that screamed FORMER STRIGOI in my opinion), but it seemed tossed in there at the end to pad the book, add the Strigoi in there since they're actually terrifying villains and fans of Vampire Academy like them, get rid of Lee since Eddie is obviously Jill's true love, and set up for the next book. This plotline was barely there, basically, and Sydney happened to stumble onto the answer at the end without any real revelations. She got lucky (or unlucky) is what I'm saying; she's pretty much a reactive "heroine" in this book. 
 You know, I thought Jill was supposed to be Sydney's charge. Yes, Sydney does a lot of bending over backwards for Jill even when it's a really bad idea (letting her model in public when she's supposed to be hiding? Way to go, Sydney), but one would think Sydney was supposed to be looking after Adrian, not Jill. Every time she has an issue, she runs to Adrian even though she repeatedly says she can't stand or handle him. She takes him job hunting, pulls some strings to get him into college, goes to pick him up in LA when he's stranded and gives up an apartment so he can have it. Really, there's no reason Sydney should be spending so much time with Adrian, except that Ms. Mead was setting them up for some epic love story and wanted to push them together as much as possible. And as excited as I was to read any scene with Adrian in it, it was overshadowed by Sydney lecturing him like he was five and them bickering. I'm not saying she should have indulged his every whim, I'm just saying he wasn't her responsibility and she should have ignored him. 
 One issue I had with Vampire Academy that is present in Bloodlines is the flow of time; most of the books barely take place over two weeks unless a time skip is tossed in there. Not to mention I have a hard time keeping track when it seems like so much has gone on (Everything in Spirit Bound and Last Sacrifice seemed like almost a year but only spanned... one month? Two?), but supposedly not that much time has passed. It's just a personal issue but I'm really not a fan of small timeframes, especially when love is thrown in there. Who falls in love in a week? I'm not that interested in everyone's day to day activities and things take time to happen, so doing the span of a novel in two weeks where you know what happened each and every day is jarring and unrealistic (sue me, I'm playing the realism card in a supernatural fiction novel). 
 Let's talk about a few inconsistencies I found. The first was when Clarence mentioned the girl that was killed in LA "a few weeks ago" and then later Sydney mentions it only happened last week. The second was Sydney saying Keith was five years older than her, but he says he's twenty-one when she frowns on him drinking wine. Sydney is eighteen, which means for someone who's supposed so good at math, she can't add or subtract very well. (And I'm not even going into the debate that some studies say that a glass of red wine a day can be good for you. According to Sydney, all alcohol is the same and automatically bad for you.) Third, the whole "dhampirs can reproduce with humans" that Sydney brings up. No, Sydney, they can't. This was established in Vampire Academy so either Sydney is an idiot who doesn't know how Moroi/dhampir reproduction actually works, or it's a typo/memory slip from Ms. Mead. Finally, Sydney thinks Lee can't use his air magic because he was a former Strigoi, where we've seen that Sonya has no problems using her magic even a few short hours after she's restored. Minor, nitpicky things, but the former doesn't help with the 'flow of time' issue I mentioned above, and the latter three are just an annoyance at not keeping the material straight. 
 I don't want to call Bloodlines boring, but it is. I don't need to read actiony books all the time and enjoy character interaction and character development as much as well (as long as the plot is strong), but I have to actually be invested in the characters, which I was 99% not at all. Adrian is really the only one who held my interest because (A) I am biased; he's my favorite character and (B) he has some golden lines throughout the book. The rest were either just there, boring, or annoying, take your pick. The story was weak and the plot was flimsy. I got tired of reading everything from Sydney's POV. The nice thing about Vampire Academy was you got to see things from both Lissa and Rose's POVs because Rose was always jumping into Lissa's head. Here we just get stuck in clinical, boring Sydney's head who can't tell when she's being hit on and acts like everything is a huge annoyance to her. Basically, I would take any other female protagonist at this point because I want to wring Sydney's neck.