Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead

Title: Vampire Academy

Author: Richelle Mead
Publisher: Razorbill

Genre: Young Adult, Paranormal

Publication: August 16, 2007

My Rating: 3/5

Only a true best friend can protect you from your immortal enemies...

Lissa Dragomir is a Moroi princess: a mortal vampire with a rare gift for harnessing the earth's magic. She must be protected at all times from Strigoi; the fiercest vampires - the ones who never die. The powerful blend of human and vampire blood that flows through Rose Hathaway, Lissa's best friend, makes her a dhampir. Rose is dedicated to a dangerous life of protecting Lissa from the Strigoi, who are hell-bent on making Lissa one of them.

After two years of freedom, Rose and Lissa are caught and dragged back to St. Vladimir's Academy, a school for vampire royalty and their guardians-to-be, hidden in the deep forests of Montana. But inside the iron gates, life is even more fraught with danger... and the Strigoi are always close by.

Rose and Lissa must navigate their dangerous world, confront the temptations of forbidden love, and never once let their guard down, lest the evil undead make Lissa one of them forever...

Vampire Academy has been around for a very long time, it's one of those series that a lot of people have read, and I just sat there, being the only person who hadn't. So I decided to get it a (long) while ago, and finally got around to reading it!

The story is very different from what I imagined. For some weird reason, I thought there was some kind of clique that both main characters were a part of. But turns out they mostly kept to themselves, even if Lissa was a royal and worked on climbing the social ladder to be one of the popular kids, it was still about her and Rose.

At first I didn't know which girl I liked more, they're so different! Although I did find Lissa a bit boring in the beginning, but we get to see more of her and her personality later in the story. Even so, I thought she was a little bit bland. Rose, on the other hand, was one hell of a roller coaster, she's pretty funny and so strong! And I love how she fights for what she believes in. She's still kind of crazy though.

I found it very interesting to read about the different kind of vampires there exist in this world, and the roles they play. Seems there's some sexism going on as well, I thought it was really awful that so few damphir girls became guardians, apparently most of them become what they call "blood whores". Damn...

And the supernatural powers they had! I really loved that, it's not like vampires here have the regular superpowers we usually hear of in other stories, but these people can learn to control elements and do very interesting things, like Lissa can.

There are a lot of other characters, but these two girls play the biggest roles. Although we do get to see this girl called Mia every now and then, who started dating Lissa's ex-boyfriend (who totally has a crush on her still) while she was away, and man is she ridiculous... If your boyfriend likes another girl, you don't mistreat the girl, you do something about the boyfriend situation. I mean, you should be together because you like each other, right? If he doesn't, then what are you even doing staying with him and getting mad at the girl he likes?

As for the girls' love interests, I really like Christian, he's so misunderstood because of his family, but he's actually quite nice! And Dimitri is pretty cool, although we don't really see much of him, but we'll probably get to read more about him in the future.


Have you read this book? What did you think about it?

Thank you for reading! ♥