Review: The Dark Heroine: Dinner with the Vampire by Abigail Gibbs

 

Hey hey literary lovers. I hope everyone out there in the blogosphere and intertubes are finding the final days of summer enjoyable. I have been caught up in the midst of back to school shopping, sales, and finding a bed for my growth spurt suffering child.

                That said, I have managed to fit in more reading in the last few weeks then I have done in the entire summer. I have taken time to brush up on my literary pedagogue vocabulary, read a new best seller and finish up a book by an author who has become a favorite of mine.  I still wish however I had Hermione’s time turner so that I could satisfy my book lust and still meet all my 9 to 5 obligations.

                First on my recently finished book list is The Dark Heroine: Dinner with the Vampire by Abigail Gibbs. I’ll admit I was not expecting too much when I picked up this book at my local library. I was perusing the new nonfiction when I saw it and it was the title that caught my attention at first, but I immediately became dubious at review statement “ The sexiest romance you’ll read all year” on the top of the cover. I’ll be quite blunt: I don’t tend to read much “sexy romance” but I still set the bar rather high: I want good story telling, characters I can relate too, and intimacy without descriptions right out of a bad porn.  All the same, I decided to give it a shot as I do enjoy urban fantasy novels, and I keep hoping that someday we will vampire series outside of Anne Rice’s novels.

                The novel details the story of Violet Lee, who is the daughter of Michael Lee, who is England’s Secretary of Defense. In a seemingly random series of events, she is kidnapped by Kaspar Varn, prince of the vampiric Varn family and practiced womanizer. Due to the fact that Violet witnessed the killing of vampire hunters by Varn family, the Varn’s are unwilling to let her just go on her happy way, and are also unwilling to kill her due to the fact she is Michael Lee’s daughter who apparently is a known enemy of vampires. (It’s one of those the government knows about vampires but keeps it hush hush). During the course of the novel Violet is in the middle of a love square (It can’t be called a triangle because four people are involved), and is also revealed to be a “dark heroine”, one of nine women who will help save reality and the world as the characters know it.

                So I will say that while the plot is not overly original, a lot of the ideas Gibbs uses are fresh and enjoyable. I am glad that instead of mutating the vampire myths she stuck with what I feel best is part of the vampire myths canon: the vampires acknowledge being killers, they drink blood (from people), they do not sparkle nor do they attend high school endlessly. That said, the main plot between Kaspar and Violet is fairly typical: each have other individuals who are in love with them, Kaspar and Violet start off hating each other, but soon find to appreciate and lust after each other, and then find out they are destined for one another. There is of course conflict outside of their love/hate relationship: the vampires do not want to kill Violet for fear of her father having an excuse to start an assault on them, but they cannot allow her to remain human and thus want her to become a vampire. Other vampires are personally offended at the premise of Violet being a dark heroine as she is just a mere human, and attempt to kill her, and meanwhile there are other hunters that want to take down the Varn Family. Of course, everything ends happily with the lovers being together. The end!

                As I said, it’s not the most original plot, but it is also not the worse either.  In a lot of ways, I almost feel like The Dark Heroine is the novel that the Twilight Series should have been ( I am not a fan of Stephanie Meyer, but I have endured the movies for sake of riffing the films).  Violet is a likeable character in the fact she does have a lot of backbone (standing up to vampires is fairly gutsy) and she obviously cares for people outside herself. She and Kaspar do have a few points where their mutual verbal sniping is enjoyable and the novel allows for other characters to come across as well rounded.

                That said, it’s also pretty obvious that this is the authors first novel.    While Gibbs style isn’t horrible, Gibbs needs refinement. The scenes I was likely supposed to find sexy were actually fairly bland and while the romance between Kaspar and Lee actually makes sense in the end, there are points in the plot that just seem to be there to make more chaos then actually drive the plot along and at times, create plot holes. For example, Violet becomes the object of affection for a vampire named Fabian, a friend of Kaspar. This incites the jealousy of Kaspar’s sister Lyla and Kaspar (and thus we have our love square). However, Gibbs creates a plot hole in this when she has Lyla acknowledge she can read minds, but still is jealous over Violet – that said, wouldn’t she be able to tell that Violet has no real interest in Fabian? Maybe this is just a point where I am thinking too literally to be reading a romance novel, but it just seems the vampires end up being petty and really, fairly stupid. While I can imagine vampires being possessive, that entire sequence of events just makes me lose my ability to keep up my suspension of belief.  There are also other elements of the supernatural world Gibbs creates that seem fairly superfluous, such as the concept of other realities where vampires and humans exist and but seem to be sort of “opposite world”. It’s an original concept, it just seems unnecessary when the plot already has enough to carry it on.
                That said, I really can’t bring myself to state that this is a “bad” book. I enjoyed reading it, and I honestly think that as the plot turns its focus on the prophecy, that this series has a chance of being very intriguing. The next novel promises to focus on a character named Autumn Rose, who is the first of the nine heroines, and I’m hoping that Gibbs will be able to branch out her skills in character development and tighten down the plot to how the heroines will be able to change the course of reality.  It’s not a life changing novel by any means, but it is a fun light read when all you really want to do is be told a story that has a reasonable happy ending.

                So on this novel, if you are expecting Anne Rice- don’t read this. You will be disappointed. If you want something far better than anything Stephanie Meyers produced, go for it!

Until next time folks, Chao!