I wish I could explain why I continue to read the teenage-vampire genre. Most of the time I have no explanation, but I feel like this time I kind of did. I was involved with Big Brothers Big Sisters not long ago. My "match" ended a couple of months ago, but I continue to hear from my little Melissa. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been getting tons of "my summer is so boring" messages from her and when I heard she hadn't had a chance to hit up the library for new reading materials, I thought I would take it upon myself to find some stuff for her to read and snail mail them to her. She was/is really into the Twilight books, so I sought out for something similar, but I wanted to read it first, lest there be anything terribly inappropriate. Thanks to Google and Yahoo! Answers, I stumbled upon the Vampire Academy series. I just finished the first book. As far as young adult vampire romance fiction, I thought it was fairly on par with Twilight, but it is half as long, has a more interesting characters and lacks most of the misogynistic message Twilight so readily poisoned young people with. But this isn't about my dislike of Stephanie Meyer and her woman-hating series. . . Where was I? Oh yes, Vampire Academy. The story is told through Rose, a dhampir (half vamp, half human) teenager. Rose and her very close friend, Lissa (a Moroi or "good" vampire) are students at school for Moroi and their future dhampir guardians. The school is like a Hogwarts for the UV intolerant; it's a heavily guarded boarding school for kids who know about magic. For the most part, the story is about high school politics with a little blood drinking brought up from time to time. There is some forbidden love and vicious teenage girls, but the central focus of the novel is of the friendship between the two main female characters and I really appreciated that element. As this is the first book in the series, there was more setting up the story than having an actual conflict, but I'm hopeful that there is a little more action in the subsequent novels. And I'm really hoping they find a different guy for Rose to be into. The details of Rose's romantic situation is a little icky if you ask me. Regardless, this book was alright. I didn't love it, but I liked it enough to pick up the sequel. I dunno, I'll be interested to hear how 17 year-old Melissa likes it.
