2.-Glad it was only $.99. Found myself skimming a lot. Just couldn't get into it will not read anymore ( )

See, I still love this book. There's nothing like a true origin story that makes you want to continue reading the rest of them. I don't know if I want to read all 93 books in the series, lol, but I do want to read the second. So I'm going to go there now and do that..

I read this book when it first came out. And I just read it again. And I loved it all the more. ( )

A Shade of Vampire
By Bella Forrest
A Shade of Vampire #1

Here is another one of those books that I downloaded a long time ago but didn’t read because when I read the first few pages and discovered it was about a 17-year-old girl, I stopped reading it. I have a hard time reading romance books about protaganists who are in their teens because I can’t take them seriously. Most of them have never lived life beyond high school, never had a job, never had an apartment or had to pay bills and never had the worries that go along with being an adult. They have never had a relationship while trying to earn a living. I try to avoid teenage romance books when I can but I came across this one again so I decided to give it another chance. I was pleasantly surprised. This book was a pretty good read.

Once I got past the weird alternating POV thing, I really got into this book. The chapters alternate first person POVs. One chapter, it will be Sofia’s POV and the next Derek’s and sometimes other characters.

Sofia Claremont was upset with her best friend Ben, with whom she has deeper feelings for than just a friend, because he forgot her birthday. She goes for a walk on the beach and gets abducted and taken to a hidden island where it is always dark thanks to a magical spell. The island is full of vampires who have human as slaves. She and four other girls are given to the Derek, the prince, who has just woken from a 400-year nap and is starving for blood.

Sofia and the girls are all frightened but she takes the hand of the blonde girl next to her to comfort her. Derek noticed this and for some reason it endeared her to him but Sofia has a cut on her lip, thanks to an earlier encounter with Derek’s psychotic brother, so Derek’s hunger took over. He pinned Sofia against a column of the temple they were in and almost sank his teeth into her neck when she talked him out of it. Since then Sofia has been his favorite harem girl.
She soon learns that humans are not treated well on the island named The Shade. Vampires think of humans as playthings and as slaves and think nothing of killing them. Once a vampire bites a human, he or she becomes addicted to that human’s blood. The vampires show very little control and usually kill the human by draining them within days. The human is lucky if they last a week. The most attractive humans are made playthings of the vampires while all the others are put to work keeping the island running.

Derek Novak helped save the vampires in his coven hundreds of years ago when humans called the hunters were after them. He, along with the help of a witch named Cora, built The Shade into a sanctuary. He sent out vampires to abduct humans for slaves and for blood while Cora used her magic to hide the island and make it eternally dark.

There is a prophesy about Derek saving his kind. After all the horrible things Derek did to make The Shade possible, he believed his part in the prophesy was completed and had Cora put a spell on him to sleep forever. However, Cora knew there was more to the prophesy than what Derek knew. She made sure to build into the spell that Derek was to awake when a girl came along that would help him save his kind or something like that.

This book was not your typical vampire book. Usually, there are good vampires and bad vampires but every one of these vampires seem not to care one iota about human life except for Derek who is conflicted. Before he met Sofia, he had no qualms about using and killing humans. Derek’s thoughts were sometimes disturbing. He’d think about why he shouldn’t just take what he wanted from Sofia or someone else and bend her to his will because he was the prince and what he wants he gets. The author wasn’t always clear if he meant just taking blood from a person or raping them. I don’t think I could ever like a character, no matter what he did to redeem himself afterwards, if he raped someone. It’s strange how I can accept a killer but not a rapist. Derek has something dark within himself but being around Sofia helps him have a conscience. Derek goes to drink the blood of a captured hunter and had every intention of killing her but stopped himself just before her heart stopped. He was able to control himself.

There was a lot more going on in this book that I could tell would be part of the future plot which intrigued me. There is the threat of hunters finding them or other vampire covens around the world coming up against them. There’s a threat from within because now that Derek is awake, he is changing things and people are unhappy.

Of course, I have already downloaded the next book in the series and started reading it.

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‘A Shade of Vampire’ is one of those books that manages to be both terrible and brilliantly entertaining. Like a classic B movie it’s a mish mash of recycled ideas, one dimensional characters and ridiculous cliches that somehow comes together in a fun, satisfying, addictive whole.
Not surprisingly, the book shares many themes and concepts with ‘Twilight’ - innocent, plucky young heroine, apparently teenage but actually ancient vampire love interest, a bit of domination and implied sexual violence. The fantastic setting (a between world where the vampires live safe from human interference and keep human slaves) is a weird mix of medieval and modern, and manages to make the dubious sexual politics less problematic than it was (for me at least) in Twilight. The sex and violence go a little further in ‘A Shade of Vampire’, but only a little and the mix of that and the melodramatic, daytime soap style interactions between the characters make for a book which is a lot of fun despite all its flaws. I really liked it and am stoked to see that there are another 50 odd books in the series! ( )

I did the audiobook for this and I really just wasn't feeling it. I got through the whole thing, but I don't plan on reading or listening to the rest of the series. For me the sentences were just too short and choppy. I felt like the story like was very weak. It just really wasn't that interesting. ( )