Book Post #3

The Dark Heroine: Dinner With A Vampire - Abigail Gibbs

Dinner with a Vampire written by Abigail Gibbs is a work of fiction with a romantic edge. I am less inclined to list it as 'dark fiction' which a lot of these vampire romance novels get listed as, as I didn't find it very dark at all. But I will get on to that in a little while. This is the first book in a series of books (The Dark Heroine Series) with the second book awaiting release. So the book in general, and for its majority covers the plight of our main character Violet Lee who is taken hostage by a group of Vampire royalty and where she develops for feelings for one of her captors Kasper Varn.

Now my first impression of the book from the first chapter are not good. I found the writing very mediocre and that lots of sentences seemed poorly constructed, which actually made the book hard to read at times. For instance in the first chapter Violet witnesses the vampires from a hiding place, where they haven't noticed her I'll add, and for a very flimsy reason pronounces one of the vampires a 'Jerk' out loud which causes them to notice her and ultimately capture her. It just felt this was a very unimaginative way for the two main characters to be thrown together.

As I progressed on from the first chapter (I must admit that I nearly didn’t carry on reading due to this first chapter) I still felt that the writing style was poor and many sentences seemed childish and it is obvious that the author is young and that she is new to this. I would have expected better editing from the publishers and over the course of the book I found many missing words and repeated phrases which ruined to the flow of the book (which does pick up after around chapter 5). The book is written mainly from Violets point of view. I also found at times scenes where very ‘Twilighty’ such as when Kasper picks Violet up over his shoulder and runs off. The story line begins to pick up from around chapter 3 but found that for the majority of the book was very alike to the majority of books from this genre and nothing standout about it.

I will add the writing improves greatly as the story carries on and actually the story as a whole is very pleasing to read. I managed to read all of it in about a day and considering the author started writing this when she was 15 and that is used to be listed on watt pad that the writing errors are less her fault and more down to poor proof reading by the editors. I will be reading the sequel when it comes out as I whole-heartedly believe her writing will have improved as it did through the course of the first book. It is however very similar to twilight/house of night etc. so if they are your sort of book go for it. Just don’t expect anything out of this world as you will be disappointed like me, who thought I was going to be reading something new and exciting rather than a gory version of books I have already read many times before.