shadow kiss

When I first saw the covers for Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy books I thought they were giant rip offs of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Not the books themselves, mind you, just the covers.  It put me off because as you all know I am a huge judge-a-book-by-its-cover type of person.  A friend lent me the first book and since I was running out of good books to read I thought, why the heck not and started reading.  So I did and I really enjoyed myself.

Mead has a slightly different vampire mythology and I’m just not going to get into it here.  It’s just too complicated.

This is the fourth book in the series and things are getting heavy and starting to change for Lissa and Rose.  With graduation only months away the damphirs are assigned to a Moroi classmate to ‘protect’ for the rest of the school year as part of their training.  Their teachers will at times pose as Strigoi attackers at random times to test the Damphirs to see if they’re ready to protect their charges.  Strange things start happening not only to Rose, but to the entire Academy.  In the middle of everything they discover that Victor is getting ready to stand trial for kidnapping and torturing Lissa and Lissa is not on the witness list.

This installment of the Vampire Academy series was full of tension, action and grief.  Rose is such a wonderful character.  She’s full of life, opinionated, sarcastic and she sticks to her guns.  She’s struggling with being in love with a man she knows she can never be with, being the best guardian she can be and coming into the realization that once she graduates her life will never be hers.

Christian got more of the spotlight this time and I have to say that the more I get to read about him, the more I like him.  Adrian is also developing into a fantastic character.  I was a little disappointed in Lissa, though I understand the direction that Mead is taking us.

Now that Rose has made her choice I am anxious to see where she goes with it in the next book!