(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)

She’s responsible and takes life too seriously

Susan Ethans is a model student: perfect grades, a dream scholarship, and a promising career ahead of her. But her grades alone aren’t enough to flirt with the hot guys on campus. She doesn’t want to end up being a wallflower, but there isn’t much she can do about it.

A vampire bites her

A madman bites her neck and drinks her blood. She tries to get away, but he drains her life away until she collapses.

She thinks she’s going to die, but she wakes up at an eccentric millionaire’s home. She feels healthy, renewed, and even smarter. Something is changing within her.

He has everything… except love

Nicholas Hill has power, money, and an English accent to die for, but he speaks like a man from the 19th Century. His notions of propriety and manners make him different to every other man in the world. Susan is instantly attracted to him and knows that he likes her, but something tortures his soul and doesn’t let him follow his heart.

Will an ordinary girl change a powerful businessman’s life, or will their personalities clash until they can no longer stand each other?

[Full disclosure: I requested and received a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]

This is mainly a character-driven novel so first I’m going to talk about the main character: Susan.  Susan is essentially the same kind of person that I am.  She works hard to please everyone at the expense of following what she really loves as well as having a social life.  When she becomes a vampire and is intoxicated by her new powers, I can totally understand her suddenly wanting to leave it all behind despite working so hard for her spot in university and her scholarship.  Sometimes you just want to say “screw you” and leave it all behind and a life-changing event like realizing you’re a vampire can do just that to a person.  So while I know that a lot of people will hate Susan for giving up everything, for me she was definitely easy to relate to as a character.

The Vampire’s Bite is ridiculously short at only 85 pages, so we really do have quite a fast-paced plot.  Susan herself sometimes slows it down, however.  She takes interludes to describe everything in great detail as she comes into her new powers, but then never really goes anywhere with those new powers.  I would have liked for her to have more interaction with Nicholas simply because then things would be explained, but that was not to be.  I really would have liked for Eve Grant to extend her book for a little more detail, rather than shoving the explanation into the sequel because while it does make the plot fast, it leaves you with more questions than answers.

With all that said, The Vampire’s Bite is not a bad book.  It will never be high literature and for myself it’s more guilty pleasure than anything.  I wasn’t intrigued enough to want to read the sequel, but some of you might if you give it a try.  If you’re into the modern vampire (suave, sophisticated and rich) then you’ll probably like it, but if you’re new to the whole vampire thing it wouldn’t exactly be the first book I’d recommend.  In the end, it falls somewhere around the middle: it’s not great and it’s not bad.  It’s just a solid ‘meh’.

I give this book 3/5 stars.

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