A Shade of Vampire by Bella Forrest

Somehow, I stumbled upon this series called A Shade of Vampire.  It begins on the 17th birthday of Sofia Claremont, who is woefully stumbling down a beach in Cancun feeling sorry for herself because her best friend, Ben is rolling around with some girl, and sigh .. she's been in love with him forever, but he has friend-zoned her.

 

Aside from wanting to shoot myself in the face at this so horribly, horribly cliche moment, I kept on trucking.  Thinking ... it could only get better, right?  

Well, she ends up on this perma-night island called The Shade after being kidnapped by a vampire.  This vampire, Lucas, seems like sadistic bastard, who wants to claim Sofia for himself, but alas, Sofia is to be reserved for his younger brother, the reigning vampire prince, Derek.   Of course, you learn that big brother Lucas can't deal with that, so there is one of the conflicts.

For some reason, Derek takes an instant liking LOVE to Sofia and decides that she is going to be his personal slave and that nobody can touch her, and anybody who does faces the wrath of Prince Derek.  (Hence the problem with Lucas arises, especially after he torments her behind closed doors and she's too afraid to mention it to Derek, even after Derek has told her he would protect her and all of that other manly-cliche-ridden-stuff.)   I hate insta-love!! And it's literally what this whole series is based on!  Oh but wait!! In addition to INSTA-LOVE, there is the--but wait, I can't love him, he's a vampire/oh wait, I can't love her, she's a measly human!  Oh, gag me with a shovel!  Are you freaking kidding me?!

I guess by the way this review is going, you can tell I'm not entirely sold on this series.  The book, like this review, is very vague.  It's a quick read, maybe a little over a hundred pages, but it merrily skips along, supposedly lasting months. I kinda felt like I had been time-warped by Castiel by the time I was done with the first book.  I'm leaving major plot-points out of this review, because if I mentioned them, I would have literally re-written this book in fewer words than it took to get it published to begin with. 

So, in answer to the question I asked myself at the beginning of this book:

it can't get better.

But what am I doing?!  I started reading the second book!! And alas, it got better, much much better, it just took ANOTHER hundred pages... I guess it was a good thing the second book is around 300 pages long.  So ultimately, I suppose you could say:

 

I'll give this series another shot, I suppose.