Morning, everyone! I'm a stop on the TLC tour for Abigail Gibbs's The Dark Heroine: Dinner With a Vampire this morning!I feel like I'm a pretty big supporter of the idea of the new New Adult category. Personally I think its super unfair that readers generally have the option to read about teens or thirty+ adults and nothing in between. Abigail Gibbs's debut The Dark Heroine: Dinner With a Vampire is one of the first "New Adult" titles I'm seeing promoted so far. I'm sure there's a decent sized audience for this particular book but I'm not it. Oops.
Violet Lee was supposed to be meeting her friend at Trafalgar Square, instead she ended up witness to a massacre. She's discovered and kidnapped by the killers who just happen to be vampires -- and vampire royalty at that. Though she's a hostage, she's also under the protection of the royal family. Violet's father is a high ranking government official, one who's not a friend to the vampires, making Violet a pawn in a game of politics. As her time amongst them stretches on, she finds herself unable to resist an undeniable attraction to her captor, Prince Kaspar, though she'll fight it as long as she can.
It's admirable that not only has Gibbs (who's just begun university, if I read her bio correctly) has become so massively popular so quickly. She originally released Dinner With a Vampire on Wattpad and scored a six-figure publishing deal as a result. All while she's still a teen. That's huge! Unfortunately after the initial action of the beginning, the book started become overwhelmingly cheesy for my taste.
First, I had a hard time believing that Violet (or any girl who's supposed to be as stubborn as she appeared at first) would give in to Kaspar so easily. It would have been easier to believe her falling for Fabian but the love triangle then became a bit tedious considering.
I should point out, though, that the book is marketed as a romance and doesn't pretend to be otherwise. My own personal taste would lean to more of the prophecy and the dark heroine myth and less of the Kaspar/Violet/Fabian drama. It also became a bit hard not to draw Twilight comparison once the romance came into play.
For more stops on the tour be sure to check out the official TLC tour page here.
For more on the author, you can visit her on Wattpad and like her on Facebook. There's also a group page for Dinner With a Vampire on Facebook.
Rating: 2/5
3 comments:
I was just shelving this book in the store yesterday and wondering who its audience was. Now I know!
I'd like to see more discussion of the new NA category. I personally am not a fan of creating another reading category--I think there are lots of books out there featuring protags in their 20s. But most people I've talked about it with agree with me, so I'd like to see more of the opposing POV.
So in this case the protag is 17 but the book is bit more steamy than a typical YA. I have sisters in this age group - the oldest younger sister will be 21 and the other two will be 19 - the older one definitely has complained about this gap in the market and I had a hard time finding things when I was a bookseller, too. I think I noticed the lack of older teen/younger 20s characters more in the other subgenres (paranormal especially).
Darn, I'm sorry this book wasn't quite the right fit for you, but thanks for sharing your thoughts for the tour.
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