A Shade of Vampire

A Shade of Vampire by Bella Forrest
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Available on KU

Sofia Claremont’s life has never been normal. As a child, her father was barely home and her mother… well her mother wasn’t exactly normal either. Eventually she was taken away and Sofia was left with her neighbors and the occasional check from her father. At least he hasn’t completely forgot about her.

On the evening of her seventeenth birthday, Sofia goes from walking the beach as a tourist in Cancun to being a captive of dangerous pale creatures who want more than just her blood. She is kidnapped and wakes on an inescapable, untraceable island known to the vampires as the Shade. She has no allies and her death in certainly in the future, it’s just a matter of who.

For five hundred years, the Shade has shielded the most powerful vampire coven from the sun. And for four hundred years their prince has been asleep. Now he is awake and Sofia is chose to be one of his. Despite his vast power and obvious thirst for her blood, his quarters might just be the safest place on this godforsaken island. Especially when Derek’s brother wants to claim Sofia as his own.
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For starters it’s a nice story, but I feel like I’ve read it before. It was like a combination of Twilight and Captured. That being said, I was not a huge fan of Twilight and I really like Captured (The Captive series, by Erica Stevens) so you can see how confused I am! Having like Captured as much as I did, I found it difficult to get into the rhythm of this story because it was so similar! Captured was just done better in my opinion.

I also had some trouble with the characters; I felt disconnected from them! There was an insta-love vibe coming from Derek and I did not dig it (when do I?). I think I was hoping for Derek to be a darker and more mysterious character. He is described as the Dark Prince but the only thing he had going for him was that he was the legendary prince. I think the book could have gained from a POV from just Sofia instead of the dual POV with Derek. That would have made Derek’s character more mysterious and we would be right there with Sofia questioning his motives. It would have made it so much more interesting!

The relationship between Sofia and Derek seemed very abrupt. As I mentioned before, Derek fell really fast and really hard. The next thing I realized was Sofia had him wrapped around her puny human fingers. I felt liked we were jipped of the love story between them. I wished the author would have gone into more detail on this, especially when Sofia always described him as brooding and stoic. There was a short paragraph that described her teaching him to use a camera and they spent hours taking pictures and laughing. It was the first time she experienced this bit of humanity from Derek and we only got a measly paragraph about it! That disappointed me.

There were a few holes in the story, especially with Sofia’s family. What ever happen to her parents? What was her mother? I don’t think she was just crazy, which means she had to have some type of paranormal powers. There are so many unanswered questions and I assume they are all solved in many many books that follow this novel.

I really wished I could’ve like this one a bit more, but it is what it is. I liked the last 15% of the novel the best and will probably continue the series because it just ended! I needed more than that!

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