Vampires, vampires and no more vampires after that
I finished Biting the Bullet the other day, the third in the Jaz Parks series. There wasn’t much going on in it, except that Jaz gets a power up and her first kiss with Vayl. So yeah, you could skip it, or just read the second half.
I still want to know what Cassandra meant by Bergman having a bent towards magic, but that’s now conflicting with the revelation that Granny May may have hunted down demons too. I so want to see what Jaz does to find out if she did.
There was a bit more general shipping too, with David and Cassandra falling in love with each other. And of course Bergman getting some needed confidence. He was so cute trying to be brave. (Yay for favourite characters being secondary ones!)
I did mention the Vayl/Jaz kiss, right? Not quite as romantic as you would think but it was fun. Him slapping her on the butt afterwards was possibly even more amusing. See? Vampire with a sense of humour which is sometimes crude. That is what you get when an 18th century man hangs out in America for 80 years.
Oh yeah, Cole and his ‘need to chew something’ neurosis was… interesting to see described, especially when Jaz gave him her leather wrist sheath to chew on.
And I kind of, kind of, want to draw Murderess!Jaz. Kind of.
To the second vampire book I’ve read recently, Vampire Academy.
Yeah, I was kind of dubious about the title too. Too similar to Vampire Knight. Luckily, there’s no incest. Hurrah!
Despite the lame title, it was actually decent. Better than Blue Bloods that’s for sure. In terms of action-packedness, somewhere between Peeps and the Nightworld series, though in terms of scary vampires, a bit closer to the Blue Bloods and Peeps i.e. mostly harmless with a side order of earth magic.
However, the half-vampire dhampir make up for the vampires wussiness. They’re the guardians of the mortal vampires (the born ones/moroi) against the immortal/dead/strigoi which are vampires who have killed someone by draining their blood. And, luckily, the story focuses on one Rose Hathaway who is a guardian. Whoo!
We also get to see Dimitri (another guardian and, predictably, falls in love with Rose) and Christian (vampire, kind of an outcast, boyfriend of Lissa, actually uses his fire powers to attack) who are also kick-ass.
Lissa is the other main character, full-vampire, head of her family because they’re all dead and definitely gentler than everyone else. Best friend and bonded to Rose. She gets healing powers and… you get the picture.
Anyway, the plot revolves around those four, mostly. It’s not a great one, but at least there are no fallen angels or it being purely driven by romance. Loads of filler to get a sense of time and backtracking to tell you what happened before the story started.
So, overall, not brilliant. But not an “Oh god what the hell is this shit” book either. Junk food reading really.