Rose loves Dimitri, Dimitri might love Tasha, and Mason would die to be with Rose…

It’s winter break at St. Vladimir’s, but Rose is feeling anything but festive. A massive Strigoi attack has put the school on high alert, and now the Academy’s crawling with Guardians—including Rose’s hard-hitting mother, Janine Hathaway.

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GoodReads Summary:

Rose loves Dimitri, Dimitri might love Tasha, and Mason would die to be with Rose…

It’s winter break at St. Vladimir’s, but Rose is feeling anything but festive. A massive Strigoi attack has put the school on high alert, and now the Academy’s crawling with Guardians—including Rose’s hard-hitting mother, Janine Hathaway. And if hand-to-hand combat with her mom wasn’t bad enough, Rose’s tutor Dimitri has his eye on someone else, her friend Mason’s got a huge crush on her, and Rose keeps getting stuck in Lissa’s head while she’s making out with her boyfriend, Christian! The Strigoi are closing in, and the Academy’s not taking any risks… This year, St. Vlad’s annual holiday ski trip is mandatory.

But the glittering winter landscape and the posh Idaho resort only create the illusion of safety. When three friends run away in an offensive move against the deadly Strigoi, Rose must join forces with Christian to rescue them. But heroism rarely comes without a price..

My Review:

This review is spoiler free, however, if you have not read the first novel, Vampire Academy, there will be spoilers for that. You can read my review for that here.

I continue to very impressed by Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy series. As I said in my previous review, I am not a fan of vampire novels and I tend to judge books by their covers and their titles and neither was working very well for this series. However, I decided to give it a chance, because there is a movie coming out in February and it seems to be a very popular series. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I really enjoyed them. I decided to continue onto book two, to see if I’d want to continue on to the whole series.

I really loved this novel, probably even more than I liked the first one. I kind of liked the whole winter wonderland, ski trip of it. Its very posh, and very private school-ish and I always kind of enjoyed reading stuff like that because its so far from anything that I experienced. I liked that, in this novel, we really start to focus on Rose. In the previous novel, Rose is the main character but our concern is mostly for Lissa the entire time, and there is more of a development in her character than anyone else’s. I really liked how in this novel, its more about Rose. She is dealing with the return of her absentee mother, her feelings for Dimitri and how he can’t reciprocate them, and with becoming a guardian and what that entails, beyond the glory.

I really love Rose as a main character. She’s a teenager so she’s volatile and emotional and she’s back and forth, but she’s also so real, and I love her ambitions and her confusions and I love how hard she works. I love that she starts to see that the glory that is built up about her job becomes less and less as pretty as she once thought, but it only makes her want to get better, stronger, faster. She really works hard, and she’s a strong character, not just in her personality but in her actual physicality as well. I love that she’s one of those characters that doesn’t always show how she feels and uses sarcasm and wit and harsh words to cover that up, with her mom, Lissa, Christian, Dimitri, everyone. I like that. I like that because you can see her character changing as the novel goes on.

I also really liked that this novel starts to bring more of a central conflict coming in. As I said before, I think the first book was setting up the story and the characters, the background of it all. With this book, we start to get more real, we see more of the outside world and the threat that it poses to all of them, not just Lissa and her extraordinary power. They all have powers and strengths and they’re all going to need to use them in the future. While the first book made me want to read the second book, the second book makes you absolutely crave the third book. There is more of a cliffhanger, and there’s more hanging in the balance, and you just need to know what happens next and it sucks when someone has it checked out at the library and you have to wait for them to return it!

Lastly, I enjoyed the way the book ended in terms of relationships and friendships between Rose and the various people in her life. Nothing is set in stone but things are changing, evolving and you want to read on to see how things are with her and her mother and Lissa and Dimitri and you want to see how it all has an effect on who she is as a person and a guardian. I can’t wait until I can get my hands on Shadow Kiss.

Rating:

4 out of 5 Stars

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