A Shade of Vampire (Shade of Vampire, #1)

by Bella Forrest

[celinenyx]

A Shade of Vampire is a quick read at about 150 pages. It has a massive number of good reviews on Goodreads, and I seem to be one of the only people not being that impressed by this story.

Sofia gets abducted on the night of her birthday by a vampire covenant. She is to be the slave of the most powerful vampire at the moment. Will she be able to escape, or will Derek win over her heart instead?

I get that this is a short read and I get that it's intended as one, but for me it just didn't work. There was such a huge lack of detail that many parts of the story were just illogical, others I just didn't care for and overall it made the entire story fall flat. The lack of detail works through at every part of the story; we only know Sofia because of what we're told, not by what she does. Derek is even worse - he is supposed to be this vampire that has been asleep for over four hundred years, and still he talks like a modern American teen. He uses words like "jerk", while on the other hand never having watched TV or know what a counter is. At no point of the story did he ever feel ancient, just a bit alien because he's a vampire.

We barely see them spending time together, we just get told that they spend time together most of the time. Sofia also has some fellow harem-slave-girlfriends that she apparently has a lot of fun with, but they never get more screen-time than a short mention of said fun. It's a shame really because I'd love to see more of them. At one point one of the harem-girls gets killed but I didn't even bat an eyelash because I only heard her name at one point and I didn't give a single shoe about her.

The ever-old rule of "show, don't tell" summarizes my entire attitude to A Shade of Vampire. Sofia is called someone that is so in tune with her senses that she notices everything in her proximity, up to the point that it overwhelms her at times. I didn't see anything of that reflected back in the prose. Her point of view is written in first person which would be a great opportunity for us to see what it's like to be in someone's head that notices all - sadly she notices nothing. Not even when she finds the dead girl's body do we see a bit more detail. She finds her, sees her, goes sit in a corner, and that's it.

I was quite looking forward to read this book, especially because it was so short, but that seems to have worked in my disadvantage in the end. Plot-wise A Shade of Vampire is quite interesting, but the writing completely turned me off. I seem to be the only one feeling like this though, so you might feel differently as well.