You can colour me now. Shade: Confused. Please mind to stay inside the lines, there is already enough confusion as it is. 
 Let me start things off by saying that I absolutely love Jaymin Eve, have read all her work (unfortunately nothing from Leia Stone yet) so she is the sole reason I picked up this book/trilogy. 
 Ash has left me with mixed feelings. So many of them flying around and air space in my head is kind of restricted at the moment. I don't know how to express said feelings properly but I'll try. 
 We have an interesting spin to a well traded subject - vampires - and a group of main characters that seem or have the potential to be badass. Yet something was amiss here. 
 Our heroine, Charlene a.k.a Charlie is what bugged me most of course. There are features I loved about her but there are a lot of features I downright hated. Though this can be said about everything you encounter in life, I know. What irked me off was that I saw tendencies to shaming. Charlie talking about other girls and judging them based on appearance was something I didn't approve. There was some Ash/Vampire blind hate which was extremely intense in the first half of the book that I also didn't like but I kind of, sort of understood - you fear what you don't understand. But that particular annoyance was smoothed out later on. 
 One other thing I didn't like was how she changed from "I don't grovel or get attached to guys I don't know" to "Love-sick bitchy puppy" in what seemed like a blink of an eye. She started to tell us in the beginning of the book about how other girls groveled about and got attached to a male, drugging her BFF down the dirt as well, and kept this up throughout the book, yet she did the same while she was bitching about it. I simply didn't get it. 
 Even the romance itself left me confused. We have a case of insta-love/lust and yet we don't. I have to admit that the build-up is good though. Sort of.. 
 The action was ok. It needed some more emphasis on the culling battles. We had been so amped up about it being all survival, kill or be killed situation but in the end I didn't get not a single vibe of that. It simply happened and we moved on over it like the small blip it was on the radar. 
 There are a lot of things left unsaid, unanswered, unresolved and unimproved but this can be justified as it is only the first book of a trilogy thus I won't come to any conclusions yet. As I said, or more accurately tried and failed to say, I had some issues with the book yet I did somewhat enjoy it. I will have a clearer and definite opinion when I am done with the other two books, probably.