Who wouldn’t kill to have the opportunity to spend an entire school year in Paris? Apparently, Anna thinks it’s a horrible idea and fights it even while she’s already in the beautiful country of France. Luckily for her, even though she doesn’t think so at the moment, her parents don’t give her the satisfaction of spending her senior year of high school in Atlanta. At her new school, she will have to learn how to immerse herself into the French culture, pick up on the language, and everything else that comes with studying abroad.
Anna meets an amazing group of students at her new boarding school, including one very charming boy named Etienne St. Clair, and she is immediately smitten. They live close to one another in the dorms, are in some of the same classes, and Etienne really helps Anna learn how to adjust to being in a new country and a new school. They are the perfect couple, even if they aren’t an actual couple. There’s just one problem:
Etienne has a girlfriend, and it’s not Anna.
While this may have the “typical” Young Adult love triangle that seems to resonate strongly in a lot of other books, I didn’t feel like this one was that terrible. It didn’t feel like it was unnecessary to me, and it didn’t start off as a love triangle at all. Etienne knew how he felt about his girlfriend, and was very loyal to her even with his friendship with Anna. It wasn’t until his girlfriend started getting really jealous about him being with Anna that the relationship starting to crumble. Even though Anna really started to like Etienne, when she found out that he was seeing someone else, she made sure that she didn’t act on her feelings.
I feel like this book could have been a standalone book, but it looks like it is part of a trilogy. The other two books don’t seem to have anything to do with Anna and the rest of the characters from this book, but since I have yet to read it so I don’t know for sure. Anna really grew into herself by going to Paris, going to this boarding school and living out on her own. I feel like she needed this in order to find herself and become her own woman. She learned her own worth by not allowing her crush from Atlanta to string her along while he went out with her best friend without saying anything. By the time she comes back to Atlanta, she tells him just where he can stick it, and it was such a worthwhile moment.
Rated: 5/5 Stars
Tag: 2015 Book
Frostbite – Book Review
It was bad enough that Rose and Lissa had to deal with a betrayal so close to them when they were taken back to St. Vladimir’s Academy in the first book. To have your own uncle go behind your back and try to have you sacrifice your mind and spirit just for him to have his health back is enough to make you lose your trust in anyone. But that was only the beginning of the story. Dangers lurk ahead of the lives of Rose Hathaway and Lissa Dragomir, and the Strigoi are nowhere near done with them.
In the aftermath of the events of the first book, St. Vladimir’s Academy feels like everyone needs a break for all the death and destruction. With another Strigoi attack so close to the school, the authorities decide to move the entire school to a winter vacation in Idaho, a “mandatory holiday ski trip” if you will.
But just because you take the kids out of the school, it doesn’t mean the danger takes a vacation and leaves them alone for the holidays.
If anything, it just makes things worse. Putting so many Moroi together in one spot, not just the children but the adults as well, makes it that much easier to cause some trouble. Three of the students end up running away, trying to do what they think they need to do in order for the Strigoi to be destroyed once and for all. They leave the safety and comfort of the ski lodge to the nearest town where they heard another attack occurred, and it’s up to Rose to make sure that none of them end up dead. Does it work out in her favor? Is she able to save them all, or does she end up being captured herself?
This addition to the Vampire Academy series really shows just how much things can change in a matter of days. Rose matures from the impulsive girl we know and love into one that has seen tragedy firsthand and must change the way she does everything. The journey isn’t over yet, but Rose has more than proven just how strong an adversary she can be, and the will to survive and protect those she cares about will be what makes her extraordinary. She has to grow up pretty fast in this book, becoming responsible for her three classmates that escaped the lodge and trying to save them from the Strigoi that want to either kill them or turn them into part of their ever growing army. They even discover that the Strigoi are so much more organized than they imagined, and that there is something way bigger going on than they believed. They are targeting the Royal Moroi families, that much is certain. But the fact that they are now working together in much bigger nests that initially thought is alarming enough, and Rose has to find out what their ultimate plan is and protest Lissa at all costs.
Rose has always been my favorite protagonist out of all the books I’ve ever read. There’s just something about her that really draws me to her, and even though she can be stubborn at times, those moments only remind her of me that much more. Like I mentioned before, she really has grown up into a mature woman and now fully understands the dangers that come with being a Dhampir, with giving her life to protect her best friend and the rest of the Moroi. Classes at the Academy don’t fully show the scope of what she needs to be prepared for, and it was not the same as seeing a Strigoi face to face, one that is older and powerful than Natalie from the last book. In Vampire Academy, she hesitated in killing Natalie, which almost cost her life, and we wouldn’t have had any more books to read. In Frostbite, she had to figure out a way to kill two very powerful enemies, with her being only a novice not even finished with high school yet. Her strength will only increase and that is something that I can’t wait to see in the next book.
Rated: 5/5 Stars
Girls on Film – Book Review
There is a difference between old money and new money. When someone thinks of old money, they think of New York City, the Upper East Side, and all those powerful businessmen and women with their hands in everything. Basically, think the world of Gossip Girl. Now, new money is different. New money is Hollywood actors and models and all those people who rose to fame recently. There’s no family history of owning property or starting businesses from the ground up. No building an empire or a legacy that lasted many generations. It’s completely different, and those with old money can feel that those with new money don’t appreciate the value of said money like they do. Think Beverly Hills, with all the agents and record companies. Two different atmospheres, two very different outlooks on life, all rolled together into one.
This is the second book of The A-List series, and the drama only gets more intense as the series goes on. We have already been introduced to Anna, our Upper East Side WASP from New York who made the big move to California to live with her father. There she meets the Unholy Trinity in the form of Sam, Dee and Cammie. Three very different girls but best friends that will do anything for each other, or so we thought. With Anna in the mix, we see that the three best friends may have a rift in their otherwise tight knit alliance, and soon those lines may change.
We see that Sam may actually like hanging out with Anna, even if they had a bad first impression. Throughout this book, you see the two of them starting to get along much better when Sam isn’t with her two best friends. The infamous Sam Sharpe actually has a heart, and somehow Anna has been able to bring that good side to the forefront. Sam may have known that Cammie was a major bitch to begin with, but now she can see that sometimes her behavior is unwarranted and downright cruel. Anna is learning quickly that sometimes she needs to play dirty in order to survive in her new zip code, but as long as she remembers who she is and where she came from, she won’t turn into one of them.
Technically this is a re-read for me, even though the last time I read this book I was either in middle school or high school. It’s been years, trust me. I don’t know what it is about this series, but I just can’t stay away from it for long. I also don’t want it to end so that’s probably why I’ve been stalling in reading the rest of the books that I haven’t read yet. In this book, Sam really impressed me with her change of character, even if it wasn’t permanent. I like that we see a softer side to her, and that she and Anna can put aside their differences to come together and work together to do what needs to be done. I would much rather see these girls become friends to be an unstoppable force, but then where would all the drama be? To me, Ben is completely out of the picture and is so irrelevant to me. I don’t care if Anna really likes him, maybe even loves him, and he still winds up to make appearances in this series. To me, the story of each of the four girls is so much more interesting to me and I would rather delve deeper into their thoughts and their psyche than Ben’s.
Rated: 5/5 Stars
Sometimes Leelynn Reads 