Thoughts: Frostbite, Shadow Kiss, and Blood Promise by Richelle Mead

These are books 2, 3, and 4 in the Vampire Academy series.  I reviewed the first one here.

I read all these right in a row, so it’s hard for me to differentiate them from each other.  And it’s impossible to avoid spoilers.  So I’m just mushing them all into one “thoughts” post, to remember what I thought about the series when the next one rolls around.  For those who haven’t read them, I’ll just tell you that if you like YA boarding school stories with vampire romance, and don’t mind some diversions outside of the boarding school, this is a good series for you.

All of these books are from Rose’s viewpoint, with occasional peeks from her into Lissa’s head.  I still liked Rose and I thought her relationship with the older Dimitri was sweet, but I have to admit that I thought her emotions were overwrought at times, especially in the last book, Blood Promise.  She has loads of memories that we never saw in the first three books, except for the one time they had sex, and it kind of irritated me that we didn’t experience as much of their love story as I might have liked.  If we had, maybe I wouldn’t have felt like she was being constantly dramatic, for all her talent as a master Strigoi killer.  Her grief in Frostbite and the beginning of Shadow Kiss was more interesting.

I loved that Rose went to Russia and explored another part of the world that Mead created.  I like the world and I felt like it became much more fully fleshed out in these three books.  I liked that Rose’s mother showed up, and more than once, so we learn that there’s a reason behind this heroine’s absent-mother syndrome, and that her mother does love her.  Rose and Lissa discover more about their shadow-kissed bond, and find other people who have it, too, as well as finding another spirit user.  Since that’s been established, the fact that they might need to use spirit, as implied in the cliffhanger, doesn’t feel like a deus ex machina.  The roots of all these problems were in the first book.  Still, I had cause to wish the plots were tighter, especially in Shadow Kiss and Blood Promise.  There is some purposeless rambling, and even more annoying one of the covers has a teaser line that isn’t answered until the last 100 pages of the book.  I hate that, but it’s obviously not the author’s fault that the publisher is trying to make the book sound more exciting.

I do have to say that I really enjoyed this series.  They were all very fast reads and I generally don’t mind cliffhangers when I have the next book right with me.  I’m looking forward to the next one, but I’m not in a rush.  I just hope that the series isn’t never-ending and doesn’t get longer and more dramatic with the next installment, but I will be reading it in May when it comes out.

I’m an Amazon Associate, I bought all these books.