As someone who rarely reads books that are part of an ongoing series—apart from Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid and Stephenie Meyer’s satirical Twilight series, I can’t think of anything since Harry Potter—making it to the sixth book in a row is a real effort and means that something must be right. While this is true—the Vampire Academy series is great fun—there is also a lot wrong with this book.
To rain down spoilers from the first five books in the series, Last Sacrifice opens with our heroine, Rose Hathaway, locked away in jail accused of the murder of Tatiana, queen of the Moroi. Rose and Tatiana didn’t particularly get along—Tatiana had recently passed a law lowering the age that guardians graduate and become fighters. As Rose is a guardian herself, trained to protect the Moroi—the good, consensual-bitey vampires—from Strigoi—the bad, murdery kind of vampire—she is not well pleased with the decision, but not enough to kill Tatiana. After a previous court outburst and some shifty bribing, Rose has been framed for the crime—but by who? As she is stuck in her cell, her friends and family do all they can to help her, from trying to find the real perpetrator to using a dramatic diversion to bust Rose out of the big house.
The Vampire Academy novels rely highly on throwing twists and shocks in every chapter, so I’ll try not to say much more. Suffice it to say the series relies heavily on action and drama, neither of which really can happen in a jail cell, so Rose is out and about breaking hearts and staking vicariously shortly into the book, making new friends and new enemies and smooching—well, who? Longtime readers will be either Team Dimitri (Rose’s first boyfriend, guardian trainer and someone who was turned Strigoi then brought back by Rose’s best friend, Lissa) or Team Adrian (when Dimitri became evil then broke up with Rose, in that order, Adrian was there to pick up the pieces and smoke heavily in the background.)
As Rose blusters her way around the countryside, her best friend Lissa, who brought Rose back to life during a car accident years before, is coping with her own dramas back at court, where she is thrown into much bigger turmoil than expected. The series is written through Rose’s dramatic, biased point of view, but due to her resurrection she shares a bond with Lissa that means she can see from the other girl’s point of view. Doing this means Rose is free to keep tabs on what’s happening in court even while getting up to more hasty crimes in the American backwoods.
It remains good, action-packed fun, sufficiently dramatic, a bit sexy (but not too much for the innocent eyes of teen readers—most dalliances get interrupted at inopportune times) and full of the characters you’ve enjoyed meeting in the past. Rose is flawed, has a quick temper, but is pretty funny and does what she thinks is best, which means she is mostly likeable.
But lord, sometimes you want to just stake her in the heart. Sometimes she is so stupid, or brash, or insensitive, that you really wonder if it would be so bad if she got executed for treason after all. Rose is a pain in the ass, and if it wasn’t for the fact that she is tall, fit, gorgeous, and could beat up anyone who looked at you funny, would she ever get as many marriage proposals and men willing to do anything for her? Her decisions are frequently annoying, and her reasoning behind the eventual relationship choice she makes feels very pasted on and does not compute with how the gentleman in question has appeared in the past.
The book could have done with a good dose of editing and the removal of one chapter ending early in the book that put my teeth on edge far too soon. The bond between Lissa and Rose has been a large part of the whole series, so when chapter two ends with Rose waking up, panicked, and the last lines being:
“What I found was...nothing.
The bond was gone.”
it’s serious business, you know? So when chapter three starts like this:
“Well, not gone exactly.
Muted.”
you feel like you’ve been cheated out of your emotions. I actually ended up marking a lot of pages in the book with scraps of paper if I came across questionable writing or plotting, but half of them fell out when I was flicking through just now to get to chapter two, so you might have to take my word on that. (One seemingly petty marked page found that someone knocked on Rose’s door in a “discrete” manner.) While I’m sure author Richelle Mead has had the series planned out in her head for some time, the eventual unveiling of who really killed Tatiana is actually kind of mean and annoying rather than a lightbulb moment where you think “of course!”. Some characters seem like red herrings, or just introduced to fawn over Rose, and some questions are still left unanswered. While the series will be continuing on with another Vampire Academy series forthcoming, one that won’t follow Rose—but apparently she will be around, so it won’t quite be the last we see of her—perhaps some of the loose ends will be tied up, but I don’t think I can be bothered reading any further now that this story has essentially reached its end point. I’ll just harass some poor teenage girl into reading them and telling me what happens to Rose in the future. “Does she get married? Does she have cute babies? Does she ever get the cute but inappropriate clothes she often finds herself wearing caught in any machinery and killed? TELL ME!!”
In summary: Below Expectations. I had hyped myself up into thinking the series was much more well-written than it is. It was still enjoyable enough, and with so many surprise moments it’s a page-turner, but I won’t read anything else by Mead because I am sick of all these improbably attractive people and their fantastical castle-related lifestyles. I really just don’t care any more.
I like to be spooked. I’m really pretty cynical in reality—I’m an atheist, I’m not spiritual, and I don’t believe in ghosts. (The jury’s still out on aliens, but I don’t think they’re here, anyway.) But damn if I can’t leave all those feelings at the door when I’m watching a movie or reading a book, and scare myself silly waiting for monsters to jump out of my closet. I find demons and hauntings much more chilling than serial killers, maybe because I can properly disconnect from reality with them. I can happily squeal and turn the lights on halfway through movies and put books down and back slowly away from them. And so on. Which is why I like John Ajvide Lindqvist, who has so far written about vampires (Let the Right One In), zombies (Handling the Undead) and, now, with recent release Harbour, the chilling, supernatural power of the Swedish sea.
A young family—Anders, Cecilia and their daughter Maja—are on the Swedish island of Domarö for a winter holiday. They ski across the icebound snow to the lighthouse island of Gåvasten for a picnic. Thinking their daughter is safe with nothing but snow surrounding them, they let her out of their sight. And that is the last anyone sees of her.
Two years later, Anders returns to the island, bringing with him an alcohol addiction and, after the breakdown of his relationship, almost no hope. It is then that he realises some questions were never answered about Maja’s disappearance, and that other questions were never asked in the first place. And that perhaps the beautiful summer vacation island of Domarö is hiding an awful secret that threads through the community’s past and out into the sea itself.
Like just about everyone who saw it, I adored the Swedish film version of Let the Right One In, and it led me to read Lindqvist’s last novel, Handling the Undead. Harbour is a much better book. It follows the same desperation felt by an adult who loses a child that Handling had, where amongst other family stories a grandfather was desperate to hold onto the child who had just come back from the dead, but who was not in any way well (because he was, well, dead and underground for some time). But with Harbour, the isolation of the book’s setting was a great improvement. Instead of covering the lives of many and the dead people they are heartbroken to let go of, Harbour stays with Anders’ family and their inescapable history on Domarö.
Harbour is a haunting story, the kind that delivers genuine chills, immersion in the characters’ lives, and possibly a slight fear of the ocean. Seriously, don’t read this at the beach, unless you want to never go swimming again. (Team it with Jaws to really ruin your holiday.) The narrative dips into the past, a device that can sometimes make me angry that the plot is being deliberately forestalled, and ruin a novel’s flow but, in Harbour, it just pulls the reader deeper into the story and creates a full background for everything that happens.
And it is an exciting, unflinching, evocative story of how isolation can change the game plan. Like Stephen King on a good day, Lindqvist taps into the surreal but not to the point of the ridiculous; just enough to test your nerves. And win.
In summary: Above Expectations (because I didn’t really like Handling the Undead, even though I desperately wanted to.)
I’m all about investment. Not the financial kind, despite the fact that The Passage is, at 766 pages, value for money, (*cough*and at the special price of $29.95 here*cough*) but character investment—where the people you’re reading about become important to you, their hopes and dreams something you are utterly involved in. And with this, the first in a now eagerly-anticipated trilogy, I was totally and utterly invested. I was trying to create extra hours in the day where I could read it: balancing it precariously on my knees while I was picking the sultanas out of my muesli, bringing easier lunches to work so I’d have less sandwich-building to do that ate into my reading time, and experiencing excitement instead of dread at the idea of catching public transport.
It’s a tale of journeys, starting with Professor Jonas Lear deep in Bolivia trying to find the rumoured cure for illnesses and old age. When he does, in a bloody and alarming fashion, it starts a new quest—one for people to act as guinea pigs to see if what was found with the horror in Bolivia can be turned into something viable for the human race. Brad Wolgast, devastated at the loss of his daughter and the separation from his wife, is a member of the FBI and sent out to recruit people, those with no hope for the future and no ties to the past: criminals on death row. When the virus works—but not as expected—they need someone younger, a child. When Wolgast is asked to collect a girl called Amy, abandoned by her mother at a nunnery, his conscience gets the better of him. But with the secluded government lab slowly losing control and the infected amassing power, he is running out of time.
Nearly a hundred years later, the world has become very small for one group of people. Peter Jaxon is waiting at the walls of his fortress home to kill the brother he loves, the brother who has been taken by the virals—the monsters the criminals became and turned others into. Virals will always come home, and so Peter waits for his brother, while the village he has lived in all his life starts to disintegrate as time and doubt get the better of them. Someone is certainly coming for Peter, but it is not his brother. For Peter, his journey is just beginning.
While vampires seem a little overdone now after so much media attention, this is an excellent representation of the horror genre. They are only vampires in a loose sense, as while they don’t particularly like sunlight, are strong and resilient and do like to consume people, they don’t sleep in coffins, you can’t have a dignified conversation with them and you can’t keep them out of your home simply by not giving them permission to come in. These monsters aren’t sparkling or cuddly—they are horrific creatures and managed to instil genuine thrills of terror into this cynical reviewer. The book is a nail-gnawing narrative of excitement as Wolgast evaluates his options and Peter discovers a world even more large and terrifying than the one he already knows.
Justin Cronin has rendered a simply amazing new world, from Wolgast’s near future (Where Dubya’s daughter Jenna Bush is, terrifyingly, governor of Texas) to Peter’s insular world, full of altered vernacular and a way of living that never leaves the four walls of the compound and is geared solely towards the inhabitants’ survival. The landscape is ravaged by the passing of time and toothy bad guys, and the world is utterly convincing.
I started The Passage apprehensive at the length, and finished it wailing with anger that it wasn’t three times the size. Not unlike Stephen King’s beautifully constructed epic stories like The Stand, I could have lost myself in Cronin’s written words forever. The characters are real and immediate, the story detailed and elaborate without being confusing, the language clear but not simplistic. I can barely wait for the sequels, and just to get more, I’m even open-minded about the Ridley Scott movie on the horizon. Run to get your copy of The Passage like there’s a convicted and infected felon on your tail. It’s simply that good.
If you haven’t read the first four books in this series, then I must say: Warning, warning! Endless spoilers ahead! This action-packed supernatural series for teens has so much stuff going on that you’ll regret perusing this post ahead if you’ve ever considered reading it.
I’ve read a few supernatural kids’ books lately, mostly because it’s a large portion of the teen market at the moment. Of course we can blame Stephenie Meyer for this (amongst other things) for showing that writing about vampires as a metaphor for teen sexual angst can make you wealthy at an almost cartoonish level. Many authors have now been able to publish their supernatural books and they are very hit and miss. Of the new deluge of books, I’ve read some terrible ones, and some okay ones. Being that it’s not my favourite genre (though what is may be still up for debate) none of them have really been angels-trumpeting awesome, but as far as pure enjoyment goes, Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy series is the best I’ve read.
Vampire Academy is the nickname for St Vladmir’s, a school for Moroi (vampires, but good guys) and dhampirs (humans with a Moroi parent, who are on this earth to guard Moroi.) The Moroi get a standard education, while the dhampirs get both a normal education and then guardian training as well, because they will only ever graduate to fight for the Moroi. Who are they guarding against? That would be the Strigoi: vampires who have killed another person, or someone who has been forcibly turned by another Strigoi. Rose, our protagonist, is a sexy ass-kicking dhampir, who is happy being a guardian for her best pal, the Moroi Lissa, but also wants to get out there and beat down some Strigoi. Things become complicated when her trainer, Dimitri, who is so irresistible that even readers want to smooch him, finally caves in to a relationship with Rose, boffs her in a shed, and then is promptly turned Strigoi three pages later. That all took three books to happen, and book four was spent with Rose tracking him down to Siberia, where he kidnapped her and tried to convince her to turn Strigoi so they could go on murderous sexy rampages for eternity. She declined and smacked him down, but had learned that maybe, just maybe, there was a way to turn Strigoi back into who they were.
Spirit Bound finds Rose and Lissa after graduation from St Vlad’s, at the Moroi court, waiting to find what will happen with the next stage of their lives. Now is the time when the guardians are doled out to the Moroi, and while Rose always wanted to be with Lissa, she may not be able due to skipping school to head to Siberia for a few months the year before along with the endless dramas she gets caught up in, and because Lissa is a princess—and the last of her line—they need someone stable to guard her. So now Rose needs to show that she is a good influence, but because she’s the kind of person who will throw herself into ideas with abandon, she takes off, with Lissa and another guardian, to bust someone out of prison who could possibly help Dimitri. And I can’t really say more, because there are so many dramatic twists thrown in I’ll surely ruin something.
Vampire Academy is not a perfect series. It suffers from the overblown chapter endings I hate, where authors seem to feel the only way to get people to continue reading is to end a chapter with someone making a dramatic proclamation that leaves everyone reeling. To Richelle Mead’s credit, she’s not as bad as James Patterson, who does the same thing but has literally more than a hundred chapters per book that all end like that—Mead does rein that in, to about twenty-seven chapters. The writing can be a bit standard and clichéd, and there is a fair amount of brooding about boys. But it is much less painful than Twilight, mostly because Rose is a much better female protagonist, who doesn’t just sit around waiting for boys to be violent towards her and each other (because that’s what they all do, right?) but jumps into the fray, is loyal to her friends, has a finely tuned sense of right and wrong, and makes it her life’s work to fight for what is just. She’s much more realistic, in that she sometimes jumps to conclusions, gets angry or jealous, and gets into petty fights when she’s in a bad mood. She’s sixteen at the start of the books, and teenager or not, that’s how people are. Fallible humans. She’s also up for parties, loves pashing boys, and doesn’t have to worry about the poor helpless mens unable to stop themselves hurting her during sex. She lives in a fantasy world, but the reactions of the people around her make it seem much more grounded in reality than other books. It’s also fun—some of these books are so depressing I can’t figure out the point of trying to save the world when everyone is so annoying—and Rose’s sense of humour sustains her and the reader throughout hard times. And this book, above all others, really slaps her with some hard times.
There are a lot of characters that dash in and out of the books. Some are frontline characters during the first half of the book and then vanish from thought by the end of it. It can be hard to keep up with who’s who, though Richelle Mead will explain who every character is—there’s just a lot of them, and it’s difficult to remember why Rose likes or hates them. (She doesn’t really do neutral.) Despite that, Spirit Bound, and the whole Vampire Academy series, is a rollicking, enjoyable read that covers some familiar ground, makes for some interesting new drama, and is a much better example for the Youth Of Today than Twilight. The final book’s out at the end of the year, and while I’ll pretend to be mature and indifferent, secretly I can’t wait.
