Tagged: vampires
Black Moon by F. M. Sherrill & Becca C. Smith
(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)
Shea Harper is forced to stay in boring, hot and dry Phoenix, Arizona for college. But once she meets the enigmatic yet positively egocentric Lucian, Shea’s life changes forever.
She finds out that she comes from a long line of descendants called Vessels. In her soul is the key to destroying an ancient prison protecting the world from darkness itself: Lucian’s father.
Up until now, Lucian has captured every descendant except Shea. With her powers awakening, all vampires want to drag her down to the pit. But Lucian is territorial. She’s the first female Vessel… and he’s convinced she belongs to him.
Saucy and tauntingly surprising, Black Moon captures the struggle between burning desire or denying the heart. This is a love story that will drain you dry.
[Full disclosure: I received a free print copy in conjunction with the blog tour in exchange for an honest review.]
I really do love the characters in this novel. Both Smith and Sherrill did excellent jobs with their respective characters, Shea and Lucian. I felt like I really was in Shea’s and Lucian’s shoes during their chapters and I understood their motivations for their actions. I’ll admit it: sometimes I’m a sucker for tales of forbidden love. And boy, does Lucian ever fit the bill here. Our dark vampire here used to be a slave in Egypt who loved the beautiful Nefertiti but was killed for it. After all these centuries, he still loves her despite the tragedy that befell her because of him. His guilt and his love are clear in many aspects of his life…until he meets Shea.
As an Egypt buff, I loved the infusion of some history into Black Moon, but it was rather disappointing that Smith and Sherrill played fast and loose with the facts. No, Nefertiti was hardly captured in battle along with her father. No, her father’s name was not Ur-Nammu. And no, she was certainly not a slave at court with the name of ‘wife’; by all accounts she was greatly beloved of Akhenaten. Now, I can definitely forgive some historical inaccuracies in the name of a good story. But when Lucian passively mentions that Queen Hatshepsut constantly reeked of myrrh, I had to laugh. Hatshepsut was far before Nefertiti’s time and therefore Lucian’s time (since he was human then). There were three kings with extremely long reigns between the two women, so there’s no way Lucian actually would have met her.
My griping about historical accuracy aside, I really enjoyed Black Moon. It has quite a fast plot and so many twists and turns that my head was spinning by the end. Yes, in the beginning it seems to be mostly character-driven but by the end it seemed to be more plot-driven. In reality, it’s actually the best of both worlds: it’s a fast-paced novel with extremely well developed and believable characters. I thought it got a little melodramatic toward the end, but that’s a personal thing rather than an actual flaw with the novel. The cliffhanger at the end was excruciating; I would have read the next book without it anyway, but with a cliffhanger like that I know I definitely have to read the next book now.
I give this book 4/5 stars.
Blood Diva by V. M. Gautier
(Cover picture courtesy of Mythical Books.)
The 19th century’s most infamous party-girl is undead and on the loose in the Big Apple.
When 23 year-old Parisian courtesan, Marie Duplessis succumbed to consumption in 1847, Charles Dickens showed up for the funeral and reported the city mourned as though Joan of Arc had fallen. Marie was not only a celebrity in in her own right, but her list of lovers included Franz Liszt – the first international music superstar, and Alexandre Dumas fils, son of the creator of The Three Musketeers. Dumas fils wrote the novel The Lady of the Camellias based on their time together. The book became a play, and the play became the opera La Traviata. Later came the film versions, and the legend never died.
But what if when offered the chance for eternal life and youth, Marie grabbed it, even when the price was the regular death of mortals at her lovely hand?
In 2014, Marie wonders if perhaps nearly two centuries of murder, mayhem, and debauchery is enough, especially when she falls hard for a rising star she believes may be the reincarnation of the only man she ever truly loved. But is it too late for her to change? Can a soul be redeemed like a diamond necklace in hock? And even if it can, have men evolved since the 1800′s? Or does a girl’s past still mark her?
Blood Diva is a sometimes humorous, often dark and erotic look at sex, celebrity, love, death, destiny, and the arts of both self-invention and seduction. It’s a story that asks a simple question – Can a one hundred ninety year-old demimondaine find happiness in 21st century Brooklyn without regular infusions of fresh blood?
[Full disclosure: I requested and received a free ebook from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]
As my regular readers are probably well aware of by now, I love opera. It makes up the bulk of music I’ve listened to in the past two years or so and since there’s nothing on television anymore it also makes up the bulk of movies/performances I watch. I guess you could say I’m an opera fanatic, so when I saw this book on NetGalley I decided I’d go for it. After all, while I’d never heard of the real Marie Duplessis, I sure loved Violetta in La Traviata. I figured it would be nice to see a different take on the woman behind the legend.
What was really clear from the beginning is the Gautier loves opera and she loves the book by Alexandre Dumas fils. She has this excited energy about both of them that you really just can’t fake. However, to me it seemed like her love of opera sometimes exceeded her knowledge of it. When referring to a famous aria from Verdi’s Rigoletto she called it “Dona e mobile”, which is not correct Italian. It should be “La Donna e mobile”. At another point a vampire tells her he calls blood l’elisir d’amore because of the Rossini opera; that’s not really possible because Donizetti wrote the opera in question. Some other errors like saying “vencere, vencere” is the last line of the aria “Nessun Dorma” can be attributed to the lack of knowledge of characters, but the two examples above should have been caught in the editing process.
For all of my nitpicking, I really did enjoy Blood Diva. Marie/Alphonsine is a great character and is very three dimensional. She struggled so much with her transition to being a vampire and now she struggles with being a vampire because she’s falling in love with a human. A human that doesn’t (and can’t) know about her past. Marie also really struggles about what she’s forced to do for work because sometimes the elder vampires (in order to gain funds for the communal fund to help other vampires) sometimes make her revert to her old profession. It’s actually kind of sad that she was gifted an immortal life on her deathbed and yet, for all that she’s seen and learned, she’s back where she started 200 years ago.
This is mostly a character novel, so it helped that both Marie and Dashiell were three dimensional. The one thing I really loved was that their relationship was intense and beautiful, but that it also had its rocky moments. Contrary to how they’re portrayed in many novels, relationships are rarely straightforward and couples in love do argue. Marie and Dashiell certainly argue, but you can always feel that they love each other. Considering their relationship takes up most of the book, I really appreciated that Gautier spent so much effort on it.
The plot was pretty good right up until the end. As I’ve said, this was character driven so of course it’s going to be slower than a plot-driven novel, but Blood Diva never really drags. The characters are far too interesting for that. My only problem is that the ending left me unsatisfied. It fits with the theme throughout the book of Marie’s fictional incarnations, so I don’t mind that the ending was not necessarily the most cheerful ever. I just felt unsatisfied, like “I read all that only for it to end like this?”. It didn’t feel like there was much closure, really.
Still, Gautier’s writing style was beautiful, her pacing was excellent as well as her characters and she had that kind of excitement that you just can’t fake. Despite the ending and the little mistakes I really, really enjoyed Blood Diva and I hope that Gautier, whether under this pseudonym or another, writes more novels in the future.
I give this book 4/5 stars.
Discussion: The Next Supernatural Creature Fad
I think we all remember the boring horror that was the vampire craze spawned by Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga. (I still can’t get over the fact that her vampires sparkled.) For several months you could not find a YA book that didn’t feature vampires in some way or another as every author and their dog tried to cash in on the vampire craze.
Thank goodness it’s died down to a somewhat reasonable level of late. There have been quite a few trends since then, what with zombies, werewolves and shapeshifters. I’m not saying trends are bad but they’re a little boring when that’s all you see on the shelves at your local bookstore.
As for the next trend, I honestly don’t have a prediction. I think shapeshifters are relatively popular right now but there’s not as big of a market for the supernatural as there was even a year ago. Right now it’s still all dystopia, all the time in the YA market.
Anyway, what do you guys think will be the next supernatural fad in YA? Shapeshifting werewolves, sparkling zombies or something equally ridiculous? I can hold out hope that authors will try to move away from European myths and draw creatures from African and Asian cultures, but that’s really quite a pipe dream.
Discussion: Vampires
(I haven’t replied yet to last week’s discussion but I assure you I’ll be replying to all those wonderful comments later tonight after work.)
Vampires were huge a few years ago with the popularity of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. Personally I scoff at sparkly vampires but that’s probably because I do love myself a good vampire. Cold, calculating killing machines are my favourite but I love Anne Rice’s novels as well as some of the newer vampire works like Cameron’s Law. So basically I do appreciate good vampires in fiction but I’m not a fanatic that says all vampires have to be like [x]. I know at a very basic level the origins of vampires in literature but I’m no expert on it.
So what do you think of vampires in general? They were very overdone a few years ago with the Twilight craze but what do you think of their representation in fiction now? Are they still overdone, especially in YA? Do you like vampires in fiction or are you more inclined toward some other supernatural creature? If so, do you have a favourite version of vampire?
The Legend of the Blue Eyes by B. Kristin McMichael
(Cover picture courtesy of My Book Addiction.)
Arianna Grace liked her boring, Midwestern, teenage life where she ignored the many unanswered questions of her childhood. Why were her parents dead? Why did she not have family? Where was she raised until she was five? When someone offers to explain it all, Arianna thinks she’s just getting answers. Instead, she is thrown into a world of night humans who drink blood.
On Arianna’s sixteenth birthday, her world is thrown upside down when she changes into a vampire. Night humans, or demons, as some call them, live in normal society. Learning all of the new rules of a world she didn’t know existed might be hard enough, but it’s further complicated by two former-friends that now want to help her take her role as the successor to her grandfather.
There is a war going on between the night humans. Sides have been taken and lines are not crossed. Four main clans of night humans are struggling for control of the night. Divided into two sides, clans Baku and Tengu have been at war for centuries with the clans Dearg-dul and Lycan. That is, until Arianna Grace finds out the truth; she’s the bridge of peace between the two sides. But not everyone wants peace. With the night humans divided, Arianna is now a pawn in the war between them. She must choose a side—her mother’s family or her father’s—and for once in her life, decide her own fate.
[Full disclosure: I received a free ebook copy through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]
Unfortunately, The Legend of the Blue Eyes is an example of how a good premise can be ruined by mediocre writing.
The premise of B. Kristin McMichael’s world is not a new one but she puts such an unique spin on things that you can’t help but fall in love with it. She goes back to the origins of vampires and incorporates some of the old myths into a modern, sophisticated type of vampire called a Dearg-dul. The Baku and Tengu are sort of vampire/incubus/succubus combination while Lycans are quite obviously werewolves. They aren’t the typical sort of creatures you find in urban fantasy, particularly YA, because McMichael actually took the time to make her creatures unique. I honestly can’t fault any aspect of her world-building because it really is fantastic.
Her writing is not, however. It’s by no means bad but it’s not up to the quality of her world-building. She spends pages and pages on Arianna’s boy-craziness until it crosses the line from typical boy-crazy teenager to the realm of “make up your mind already!”. I’m not a big fan of romance but when done right it’s great. But it really was just not done right in The Legend of the Blue Eyes. The male leads are kind of stereotypes, one dimensional people designed to exist for the gratification of the female protagonist. While it’s sadly refreshing to see men objectified for once in fiction it doesn’t make it enjoyable or right.
I really couldn’t connect with Arianna. She’s just such a walking cliché of pretty much every YA heroine in popular fiction. Arianna can’t make up her mind about which boy she even likes, she’s a small town sort of girl thrust into the middle of a rich urban world, she’s special even amongst her own people, etc. It would have been different had McMichael put some twists on these clichés but she really didn’t.
Instead, the wasted potential of this book makes me sad. The world-building is absolutely fantastic and could be a model for pretty much every author out there, but the rest of the novel is lackluster at best. If it sounds interesting to you I’d say go ahead but I’m not going to go out of my way to recommend this one.
I give this book 2.5/5 stars.