All reviews for A Shade of Vampire (2000)
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This one was not to my taste. Sofia gets kidnapped off the beach by an evil vampire who takes her to a secret island to be in the freshly-awakened vampire prince's harem.I'm all about the overwrought YA angst, but this one just had too many places where I had to suspend disbelief (and not in a good way) and scratch my head for the plot. Why did they awaken Derek? If Lucas is all evil, why did he allow this? If Derek is all goody goody, why doesn't he immediately change all the rules on Shade? If all the other vampires are like "oh you are a legend, we shall bow down before you, we need you to save us" shouldn't that be possible?Why is Corrine helping them if she's a powerful witch?I understand Stockholm syndrome, but the insta-love (and mostly summarized insta-love at that, rather than letting the reader experience the delicious, slow build up of trust and friendship) here was too soon, too sudden, and made Sofia seem like a patsy instead of a strong character. She's all holding hands and asking "can I trust you?" and when Derek says yes is all believing and mushy. Hmm.....she's a slave. She's seen other humans horribly mistreated (although strangely enough she and the other harem girls are not mistreated in the slightest bit and she evens easily dissuades Derek the 400 year old vampire from even kissing!) and she's all like "but I can trust YOU."Maybe the whole slave thing made me squirmy. I'm not sure. But this one wasn't for me.
This is a hard review for me because I completed the series before reviewing any of the individual books. There were parts of the series that I really liked & parts that really grated on my nerves. The story wasn't boring by any means - action, love, lust, betrayal, mystery, angst, hope, forgiveness, tragedy, etc.... The series had so many elements that nearly anyone could find something they held dear from it. Like Derrick, I often wondered just how much shit they'd have to go through before death or normalcy ever found any of the characters. So, I was thrilled that the series ended on an uplifting note. That said, I think it all just became too much after book 5. Books 6 & 7 were vital to the storyline, but I just feel like a lot of the side stories within all the books should've been cut down so that the series wasn't so exhaustingly long. My main issue was the multiple POVs throughout the series. It overloaded the books, sometimes became repetitive, and just made the main story take too long. Thus a 2 1/2 star rating verses 3 stars. Otherwise, this was a nice paranormal romance/action series.
Could have been longer and more detailed, but was overall pretty good for a free book.
Definitely "young adult", but it grew on me.
Meh