Basically, what I experienced was not the worst thing I’ve ever read. the Vampire Diaries – the Awakening is well written and a nice little book for the Young Adult genre. That’s about as glowing as this review is going to get.
The main protagonist of the series is a stunningly beautiful blond who is the most popular girl at her high school. She’s been orphaned, but I really didn’t see this as supporting or adding any depth at all to the character. Rather, I think it was a device to make her somehow less hated as I could imagine this book being written exactly the same with her parents still being alive. Her love interest is a tortured vampire with family issues.
I couldn’t imagine rooting for either of the two aforementioned characters when they were first introduced. And by the end of the book I still felt the same way. And while my hatred for the main character, Elena, did lessen as I continued to read. I imagine the lessening was like how you get used to a headache over time even though it doesn’t hurt less.
This book throws around several dangerous unmeetable ideas about a kind of cosmically ordained love. Dangerous in the sense that the young audience that this book is targeted toward simply doesn’t know any better. Not that I care.
In the end when Elena storms off to a confrontation with her lover’s older brother I began to imagine that in the same situation I would be storming to the self assured elder Salvatore brother out of desire instead of rage.
I’m sure Elena will continue to aggravate me in the following books.
I would not recommend this book to anyone except perhaps as a casual read that you will not invest yourself in. Good fluff to get kids reading. Not too gory and not sexually explicit. In fact, I think this blog is less suited to young readers than this book.
I need to clean my palette with something good now.