My Initial Reaction...
Scent of a White Rose got off to a rough start for me, with quite a few eye-rolling moments, but redeemed itself big time in the second half. I still have some things that seem a bit ridiculous to me, but overall, I really enjoyed this different take on vampires.
The Narration...
Stephanie Bentley did a good job narrating Scent of a White Rose. The voices were distinct and had personality. I wasn't blown away, but it was a solid performance. The one thing that bothered me was the way she said the names of characters when the point of view changed. It was super airy, like she was trying to sound very sensual, but instead it made me laugh almost every single time.
The Characters...
Rose is a really immature, naive 20 year old. And that got on my nerves a bit. At one point I thought she was also incredibly stupid, but thankfully I was wrong on that count. Her mother was killed just 6 months before the start of Scent of a White Rose and her father is being understandably protective. Sure, he's going a bit overboard, but Rose's reaction to his protectiveness felt very immature. I think this threw me off because I went into this expecting an adult read, but really got a young adult one, complete with teenage angst.
The other element that felt really immature to me was her relationship with her boyfriend, Christian. These two are talking about loving each other, but every time they're together it's just "let's makeout." Don't get me wrong, I'm all for some sexy goodness, but that's lust. Y'all don't talk enough to be in love!
The Story...
What I really really liked about Scent of a White Rose was the unique take on vampires. We get a pretty neat origin story a good ways in that I enjoyed and they are very different from your typical vampires - but still recognizable as vampires (they drink blood, don't go out during the day, etc). I particularly liked two things the most - (1) only one vampire in a line has the ability to sire (i.e., create) new vampires at a time and once they lose that ability it takes time for a new sire to rise. (2) Vampires drift between light and dark --- intense emotions can trigger the drifting, which is manifested in a change in appearance to darker features --- but true darkness manifests in the way they treat their prey and is policed.
The vampire mythology really pulled the story along for me, because the actual plot for Scent of a White Rose was FAIRLY predictable. I say fairly because there were a couple of twists that I didn't see coming from the get-go, but once certain plot elements happened, I ended up seeing them before the characters did too. I had one frustration - there's lots of points of view in Scent of a White Rose, which is fine in general, but sometimes the timeline was all over the place. You'd be with one character tonight, the other character tomorrow morning, back to another character still tonight, and then it's morning again, back and forth. That was irritating and a little hard to keep track of at times (especially since it happened most towards the end when everything was really happening).
Concluding Sentiments...
Although the characters weren't my favorite, I found the vampire mythology really fascinating and the potential story line established in Scent of a White Rose is intriguing enough that I plan to continue with the series.