Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Vampire Academy - Richelle Mead

Date Started - 1/9/14
Date Finished - 1/13/14

I was hesitant about this one. VERY hesitant. I mean vampires are kind of overdone, right? Like, really overdone. So why did I go there? Well, because the movie is coming out in February and I saw a preview that made it look interesting (read: titillating). It seemed different enough from Twilight (yikes, a Twilight reference! How passé!) so I thought, "why not?".


Here's the summary from Richelle Mead's official page:

Two races of vampires walk our world. One, the Moroi, are alive and wield elemental magical. The other, the Strigoi, are undead and evil—feeding on the innocent to survive. Rose Hathaway—a half-vampire with poor impulse control—is training to be a bodyguard for a Moroi princess. Learning to decapitate and stake is hard enough, but Rose's real danger may lie in an illicit romance with one of her instructors

So what worked well with this book? First, Rose is an interesting narrator. She's volatile, emotional, and seems more accurately representative of teenage angst. On the flip side, her best friend, the Moroi princess Lissa, is her exact opposite - petite, delicate, friendly, positive, etc.

Second, the plot - it was well paced (without being too fast), well developed in terms of the relationships (Rose/Lissa, Christian/Lissa, Rose/Dimitri) and frankly, fun to read. I enjoyed jumping back into the action on my subway ride to and from work each day.

The only ping I might give this book was that some of the explanations took a while to come along. We don't learn why the girls left the Academy to begin with until very far along in the book - that was somewhat frustrating for me. The "thing" that Rose and Lissa don't want to talk about (Lissa's healing powers) isn't revealed for a while either.

What else? Well, I totally want to read the next one…the "bad guys" were Lissa's "uncle" Victor and his daughter Natalie (who goes Strigoi in order to bust her dad out of prison but dies during the escape); this after they engineered to kidnap Lissa so that she could "cure" Victor on an ongoing basis for the rest of his life since he has an incurable (vampire) disease that will kill him in the next few months. Victor is now cured but imprisoned - clearly he must make an escape and a grab for power somehow, but how long will he last without Lissa around to cure him? Will others learn of her secret? And how will Rose keep Lissa sane (as "shadow-kissed" Anna did for St. Victor/"shadow-kissed" meaning that she was brought back from the dead, same as Rose was brought back by Lissa in the accident that killed the rest of Lissa's family). SO.MANY.QUESTIONS! Must wait to read the next one…this is a series that I could get into and just zoom through. But I must show restraint.


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