How to use this Page

It’s a sign you like a series when you’re willing to try to overlook—albeit to ultimately still be largely infuriated by and not be able to forget—an incredibly annoying error on page one of the latest release. The series? Richelle Mead’s Bloodlines. The new book? The Ruby Circle. The error? Having Adrian (the male protagonist) […]

Add a Comment

You know you’re excited about a book’s impending release when you’ve literally instigated a countdown calculating the time until its release. And you’re emailing a friend and co-fan who happens to be in Europe for four months, telling her if she’s in doubt about returning to Australia, rest assured: the book will help smooth her potentially bumpy I’m-not-in-Europe-anymore arrival.

Silver Shadows, Book Five in Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy* spin-off Bloodlines, has just been released (Still with me? The series and spin-off and book titles can be confusing and I have to admit I still refer to everything as a Vampire Academy book).

It picks up where Book Four left off—if you haven’t read this yet, now’s the time to do the reading equivalent of lalalalala, AKA stop reading this blog post). That is, Alchemist extraordinaire Sydney Sage has been kidnapped and imprisoned by the Alchemists in an underground ‘re-education’ facility. Moroi lover Adrian Ivashkov is losing his mind with grief and frustration as he tries to use mental-health-destabilising spirit find out where she’s being kept.

With Sydney trapped in a seemingly-impossible-to-escape prison, I truly expected Rose and Dimitri to feature heavily in this tale (in truth, I expect that every book). But Mead surprised me and again kept them to cameos—she really does seem to mean what she said about being done with following their stories. That said, the way the book finishes has me convinced that the next one will surely see them come to the fore (in truth, I’ve thought that every book too).

The Silver Shadows contains less sassy repartee than previous books, but that’s both because people are trapped alone in various locations and in their heads, which makes the requirement of having someone to trade repartee with rather troublesome. Besides, the subject matter—torture, prejudice, and mental health and alcohol issues—makes for some reasonably bleak reading. In the most gripping, tale-inhaling manner, of course.

There are a few moments, though, such as when Sydney first encounters her uptight, Type A roommate, AKA ‘the Sydney Sage of re-education’. There’s also some banter about which car Adrian and Marcus should take on a roadtrip to find Sydney: a Mustang or a ‘lame yet highly fuel-efficient’ Prius that would require fewer stops and, therefore, hasten their mission.

The book touches on some more adult themes. And by adult, I mean challenging, life-changing stuff such as battling deteriorating mental health and grappling with feelings-suppressing alcohol addiction.

It handles it in a way that’s respectful, demystifying, and de-stigmatising, which is all you could ask of a young-adult text. (Forgive me for getting my responsible adult hat on, but hopefully the young adults and not-so-young adults reading the series will feel a little less hesitant to ask for help sometime if they ever need it.)

Overall, though, not a lot happens in Silver Shadows. At least, not compared with other Vampire Academy slash Bloodlines books. But the tension around Sydney’s circumstances and whether Adrian, who’s self-destructing, will be able to hold it together, propel the story tensely forward. It’s also setting the scene for a bigger shebang, which Mead cruelly (and by cruelly I mean niftily) drops on us in final words on the final pages.

Which means that, having inhaled the book that answered the year-long what’s-going-to-happen-to-Sydney-in-re-education-camp suspense, that suspense has now been replaced with what’s-going-to-happen-with-[I’m not going to issue that spoiler so soon after its release—suffice to say, the plot twist and its ramifications are big] agony.

What I am going to say is that Mead had better been well on her way to writing Book Six. Let the countdown begin.

*As a side note, the covers continue to be terrible. I’m glad someone’s finally shifting the Vampire Academy titles to a more generic VA. They need to do similarly with the Bloodlines series. Pouting generic blondes and brunettes don’t cut it. For starters, Sydney Sage wouldn’t pout lustily at a camera…

Add a Comment

Live fast, die young
Bad girls do it well
Live fast, die young
Bad girls do it well

I’ll not deny I felt a fist pump-inducing thrill when MIA’s lyrics opened Vampire Academy’s film adaptation’s opening moments. It’s exactly the song that metes out the sass and sexiness we’ve come to know and love in the book series.

(I’ve blogged about this series a bunch of times here, so if you haven’t read the books, recommend peeling off to read those reviews and the books themselves before reading this one, because there’s some assumed knowledge in the pars that follow.)

I’ll also not deny I’d been beyond excited about the film’s impending release—relentlessly so, if you were to ask those around me upon whom I inflicted my enthusiasm. The day I got to preview the film, for instance, I bounded out of bed like the character of a Disney film and smiled at strangers on the street.

I simultaneously adopted the Madagascar ‘I like to move it, move it’ song as my motif, and sent it to around as if to say: See! This is how happy I am. It’s Vampire Academy film preview day!

All this precursor is to say I’ll not deny my hopes and expectations for the adaptation were, well, high. For that reason, I took along a friend to the preview who isn’t a Vampire Academy aficionado. Between the two of us, I figured, we’d obtain an objective review.

Sadly, though, I didn’t need my friend’s more measured take to tell the film isn’t a great interpretation of the books. And that’s even before he leant across some four or five times to ask me what the heck was going on because he found the film hard to follow.

The Hunger Games film adaptations have been stellar. Even the Twilight films are comparatively better than this one. Especially by the end, they were giving us that knowing nod and wink and we were in on the jokes. So what are the issues with Vampire Academy?

For starters, the script isn’t great. The film was brought to us by the guys responsible for Heathers back in the day and, more recently, Mean Girls, so I expected cleverness. Especially as the book itself is full of zingers (Rose is, after all, the kind of character who doesn’t have a filter and does have a lot of sass). But the lines are cheesy, in the cringe-worthy sense rather than the funny one. They attempt the nod and the wink at times, but we audience members are never really in on the joke. Which makes it downright awkward.

There are lines that do work (some of which come from the books). For example:

• ‘Handcuffs?’ Rose asks, incredulously, when she awakes to find she’s handcuffed to the car, which implies she’s good enough to be capable of escape. ‘There’s gotta be a compliment in there.’
• ‘Cue cafeteria scene. Sort of.’ We then cut to the Moroi’s feeding room.
• ‘We can’t beat up everyone we have a problem with,’ Lissa says. ‘We can try,’ Rose replies.
• ‘We live in a world where the monsters are real,’ Victor says.

But when I say ‘work’, I mean ‘make you go “huh, that’s sort of clever”’ rather than actually laugh out loud or want to seek out someone to high five.

Mostly, the lines make you cringe:

• ‘Don’t worry, I don’t bite. Only literally.’

The acting isn’t great. You’d expect this from the younger, less-experienced actors. But I have to say the adults weren’t much better. The strongest performance came from Zoey Deutch, who plays protagonist Rose, but Lucy Fry, who plays her counterpoint Lissa, produced a lispy, lock-jawed accent that was distracting and not entirely believable.

The fight scenes, which I’d really been looking forward to—at least in part because the official social media account had been posting images of the actors doing some hardcore training to get in shape—were inauthentic and stylised to the point of being corny.

Think the ‘kapow’ that used to accompany the Batman and Robin fights—because that word actually popped into my head. The only one that went halfway to achieving that was the final fight scene involving Dimitri and another Guardian (I won’t go into detail). And that was really a case of far too little far too late.

Also, there is a stuffed toy fox that was incomprehensibly terrible. A taxidermied fox smeared with tomato sauce would have been a more realistic rendition. I understand that there can sometimes be budget constraints, but this was something embarrassingly else.

I didn’t absolutely hate this film, although from an objective perspective, I probably should have. If you aren’t a fan of the series—and probably even if you are—you definitely will.

But there were clearly fans in the preview screening, as evidenced by the audible gasps emitted Dimitri first appears on screen (I may have been one of the gaspers). I’d been dubious about the casting of him—he’s such a central character and one who looms large in many a girl’s eyes and heart—but I warmed to him enough to give him if not the thumbs up, then at least the ok (I will say, though, that he was a bit warmer and fuzzier than the Dimitri of the early books, and I’m not sure this is ok this early in the series).

I wanted to love this film, and there were snippets I could. For instance, it was fantastic to see a series I’d found so rich suddenly realised on film; it was great to remember elements or small details I’d forgotten woven into the film’s dialogue or background.

Worth noting is the books improve as the series goes on (Rose, for instance, becomes less annoying, things heat up with her and Dimitri, and there’s less scene-setting and more story-telling, so the narrative’s gripping and fast-paced). This first lays the introductory groundwork, so the film has to do the same. If they follow the books’ improvements, future films would likely be better than this initial one.

Overall, though it pains me to write it, I have to admit this film is, as one of its characters says (or as I thought I heard them say), ‘a few corpses short of an artery’. Fans like me will see this film and any future ones that emerge because we can’t not, but we won’t be watching them because we should.

Add a Comment

The mature thing to do when you both have enormous, suffocatingly impending deadlines as well as knee surgery and an enforced lay-off coming up would be to save up a good book for the latterly mentioned respite.

I, of course, did nothing of the sort, head-in-the-sanding it ostrich style to pretend that I didn’t have deadlines and figuring that I’d find another book to read during my post-operative recovery.

Suffice to say, I raced through Richelle Mead’s latest Bloodlines installment, The Indigo Spell, faster than you can say, ‘Bring back everyone’s favourite dhampir lovers, Rose and Dimitri’.

With the exception of a two-or-so-sentences cameo, Rose and Dimitri didn’t feature in this book. Again. Although these days I’m better able to cope, both because I’m used to the disappointment and because Mead’s fleshing out the Bloodlines plots and characters a little better than before.

Case in point: Sydney the uptight alchemist, who in this book finally loosens up and allows herself to fall in love. Well, sort of, given that she spends the bulk of the book denying and quashing it, but semantics …

The book begins with Sydney being awoken in the middle of the night by her kooky, witchy teacher to cast a spell relating to a ‘life-or-death matter’. Props to Mead for an opening that both throws you in there and, er, garners your attention:

This wasn’t the first time I’d been pulled out of bed for a crucial mission. It was, however, the first time I’d been subjected to such a personal line of questioning.

‘Are you a virgin?’

‘Huh?’ I rubbed my sleepy eyes, just in case this was all some sort of bizarre dream that would disappear …

Mead gets straight into the snappy repartee, too (although out of context this is admittedly not as snappy as I first found it):

[Ms Terwilliger] stepped back and sighed with relief. ‘Yes, of course. Of course you’re a virgin.’

I narrowed my eyes, unsure if I should be offended or not. ‘Of course? What’s that supposed to mean?’

Soon after, Sydney narrates:

I was pretty sure I could hear some large animal scuffling out in the brush and added ‘coyotes’ to my mental list of dangers I faced out here, right below ‘magic use’ and ‘lack of coffee’.

Later, she has this encounter with love interest Adrian Ivashkov:

‘Nothing will get you anywhere with me,’ [Sydney] exclaimed.

‘I don’t know about that.’ He put on an introspective look that was both unexpected and intriguing. ‘You’re not as much of a lost cause as [Rose] was. I mean, with her, I had to overcome her deep, epic love with a Russian warlord. You and I just have to overcome hundreds of years’ worth of deeply ingrained prejudice and taboo between our two races.’

The Indigo Spell continues on chronologically from the previous Bloodlines books. Sydney is still tasked with protecting sister-to-the-queen Jill, whose knocking off could, due to archaic laws not yet changed, topple the entire and tenuously held throne. The two are holed up in the decidedly un-vampire-friendly Palm Springs along with guardian Eddie, wannabe guardian Angeline, and adorable, spirit user and arguable alcoholic Adrian.

The plot hole that so enraged me last book—the fact that, despite books and books worth of rules that a guardian never leaves their guardianee, Jill is left alone and unprotected for vast chunks of time—isn’t entirely plugged in this book, but it is addressed enough that it no longer explodes me.

My main gripe with The Indigo Spell, which I enjoyed more than its predecessors mostly because Sydney stopped being so Hermione and started having fun, was that the mysterious breakaway-alchemist storyline it featured didn’t exactly come to fruition. The promising plot, frankly, fell a little so-what flat. I could be proven wrong in future books, but for the moment I’m not convinced the storyline contributed to the plot, much less propelled it forward, and I have to wonder why it wasn’t excised in the edit.

Still, it wasn’t enough to make me put the book down (in reality, my deadline issues would have been better served if it had been), and reading The Indigo Spell left me with a feeling that was a cross between the one you get while consuming comfort food and being wrapped in a freshly laundered doona on an autumnal night.

The book was also packed with enough small-moment witticisms to keep me smiling to myself. Say, for example, when Sydney freaked out because her teacher was away sick and left only instructions to work on homework for the substitute teacher.

This seemed to amuse [her friend] immensely. ‘Melbourne, sometimes you’re the only reason I come to class. I saw her sub plan for your independent study, by the way. It said you didn’t even have to stick around. You’re free to run wild.’

Eddie, sitting nearby, overheard and scoffed. ‘To the library?’

Late in the book she calls Adrian with a request that’s rather unusual for her:

‘Can you come over to Amberwood? I need you to help me break curfew and escape my dorm.’

There were a few moments of silence. ‘Sage, I’ve been waiting two months to hear you say those words. You want me to bring a ladder?’

Now, if I can just find another book to read while I’m hopped up on painkillers and propped up on pillows, I’ll be sorted book-wise for at least another few days …

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Category: Young Adult Fantasy
Keywords: Vampires, Boarding School, Best Friends, Fighting
Format: Hardcover, Paperback, eBook

From goodreads:

St. Vladimir’s Academy isn’t just any boarding school—it’s a hidden place where vampires are educated in the ways of magic and half-human teens train to protect them. Rose Hathaway is a Dhampir, a bodyguard for her best friend Lissa, a Moroi Vampire Princess. They’ve been on the run, but now they’re being dragged back to St. Vladimir’s—the very place where they’re most in danger. . . .
Rose and Lissa become enmeshed in forbidden romance, the Academy’s ruthless social scene, and unspeakable nighttime rituals. But they must be careful lest the Strigoi—the world’s fiercest and most dangerous vampires—make Lissa one of them forever.

Kimberly's review:

Lissa Dragomir is a vampire princess and must be protected from another kind of vampire race, the Strigoi, who are fierce and dangerous vampires. Rose Hathaway, a half human-half vampire, is her classmate, her best friend and her partner in crime.

After two years of freedom, the BFFs are captured and dragged back to their exclusive boarding school where they have to train to become, respectively, a political figure and a fighter/bodyguard. But they soon realize that inside their school, it's just as dangerous as outside its gates.

Rose is a strong, fun and cocky character. She is quick-witted and throws herself into dangerous situations--my kind of girl! Her narration is very clear; you learn a lot about her character.

Lissa is seen through Rose's eyes and while Rose is the physically stronger and more aggressive of the two, Lissa is not a whimp. She has some special powers (not going to tell you!) and a few problems of her own. She is the last Dragomir princess alive. Um, that's a lot of pressure.