Velvet (Swoon Novels)

by Temple West

This book is a Twilight knockoff. I knew this going in, but since I fell hard for Twilight when it came out I figured a little something similar might be fun--and it was, for the first hundred pages or so. After that, it became derivative and tedious.

First, lets go through the Twilight checklist:
-A girl (Caitlin) moves to a small town to live with family she barely knows.
-She immediately catches the eye of the lethally hot loner (Adrian) that all the girls want.
-After witnessing an inhuman feat and Adrian leaps in to rescue her from some unwanted attention, Caitlin learns he's a vampire
-Adrian tries to stay away from her and even tries to be a jerk to protect her for her own good
-Adrian's eyes change color, he's rich, and lives with his family of beautiful loners,
-Adrian has a sister who has visions
-The sister has a vision about Caitlin in danger so the whole family decides to protect her
-Adrian sneaks into her room each night
-So. Many. More.

But honestly, I was fine with the initial setup, and the writing wasn't bad (it was intentionally funny in places), what killed this book for me was the non-Twilight stuff and the overwhelming need for an editor to cut all the extraneous stuff. This book is close to 400 pages which is about 200 pages too long. It drags, big time. If someone told me this book started out as Twilight fan fiction, I wouldn't doubt it for a second. It feels like the authors just wrote extremely long, meandering chapters to meet some arbitrary word count. And as for the non-Twilight stuff involving a demon trying to impregnate teenage girls and really unsettling nightmares, blech. It was creepy with a big side of eww.

Also, cliffhanger. Yep, this is the start of a series.