Genre: Paranormal
Romance
Publication
Date: January 22nd 2012
Pages: 174
Published By:
Night
Publishing
My Review
Copy: Finished copy received from the author in exchange for an honest
review
Where To Get:
Blurb:
A
love story with bite …...
Walking
home after a night out drowning her sorrows with her best friend, Carrie,
Alexandra Jones stupidly takes a phone call from her cheating ex-boyfriend,
Eddie, and in her anger hurls her phone into the forest before her.
But
when Alex goes to retrieve her phone from the undergrowth, she and Carrie come
face-to-face with a monster they never even knew existed, a Vârcolac (a
nightmarish vampire-werewolf hybrid) and he's in search of fresh blood. The
next thing Alex knows, she is staring at the impossibly handsome but mysterious
Nathan who has helped bring her back to life, but not to the life she left.
To
her horror, she discovers she has now become a blood-drinking Vârcolac herself
and she is the only female of her kind, with the potential for breeding a whole
new army of Vârcolacs if they can only track her down and press her into
service.
And
while Alex gets to know Nathan and his shape-shifting family as they offer her
the protection she so desperately needs, unbeknown to all of them, the
Vârcolacs are getting closer …
Quotes:
“The last
thing I hear is screaming. An ear-piercing scream. And I can’t tell if it’s
coming from Carrie or me.”
“I’m going to
have to live with that knowledge for the rest of my existence. Because existing
is all I’m doing now. What I’m left with isn’t anything resembling a life. And
it’s nothing less than I deserve.”
“I think I’d
die of shock if he came in and said, ‘Hi Alex, how are you doing?’ Actually, me
dying of shock wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Maybe I should ask him to try it.”
“Wrapping my
arms around myself, I look up at the sky. There’s a star which has managed to
break through the darkness, lighting up its small part of the sky. One single
solitary star. And for a moment, I wonder if the world is actually trying to
tell me something.”
“So instead,
I sit here, torturing myself, desperately trying to hold onto my dignity, as I
once again attempt to read my magazine. But for a long time all I can manage to
do is read the same sentence over and over.”
My Thoughts:
To
be honest, I requested a free copy from Samantha Towle on Facebook in exchange
for an honest review because I LOVE free books, and based on the cover, I was
expecting to read another Twilight-esque vampire novel. Boy, was I surprised!
Samantha
creates a unique world of vampires, werewolves, and shape shifters that I
hadn’t expected. Add the fact that the story is set in England, where Samantha
lives, and you have a wonderfully fresh setting and voice on the paranormal
romance scene, especially for an American reader like myself.
This
book was also notably different from Twilight and the other myriad of teen
paranormal books out there in that this is written from an adult’s perspective.
The main character, Alex (short for Alexandra), is about 29 years old, and
being 27 myself, Samantha makes Alex very easy to relate to for someone who’s
out of their teens. She brings in a whole new level of feelings and thoughts,
coupled with more mature issues like marriage, children, jobs, etc.
Alex has just found
out her scumbag boyfriend cheated on her -- again.
Her best friend Carrie, who she’s known for 15 years since the first day of
freshman year of high school (I’m making an assumption here based on the
translation of the British “senior school”) takes her out to forget about
Eddie. That night changes both girls’ lives forever.
I
don’t want to give too much away so I’ll move on to the meat of the story.
Alex’s life is saved by a mysterious hunk named Nathan Hargreaves. He has a
sexy, rural English accent, dirty blonde hair that falls into his eyes, and a
motorcycle, as quoted below.
“I look past
him and see waiting on the other side of the garden fence the red Ducati that
lives in the barn. So, it is his bike. That makes him even sexier, if possible.
Crap.”
So
take note ladies, there’s a new heartbreaker on the fiction scene!
Alex
is a shape shifter and he helps Alex adjust to her new life. Unfortunately for
Alex, she wasn’t meant to survive, and now there’s a group of really bad werewolf/vampire hybrids called Vârcolacs looking for
her. As if Alex didn’t have enough to adjust to, Nathan is so irresistible
despite his abrasiveness, and Alex begins to have feelings for him.
I
ended up enjoying First Bitten much more
than I anticipated, and always love when I’m surprised by a book. I was
completely sucked in to the fictional world that Samantha created and was
pleased that not only is this story a fresh take on the vampire/werewolf tale,
but that the characters have a subtle depth to them. There are a few
grammatical hiccups, and some of these I admit may be due to differences in
syntax and grammar from across the pond (I’ll ask Sam about those few excerpts
and post the response later). Sam’s writing flows easily and I ended up
finishing the book in about 14 hours, despite working out, showering, teaching
for 7 hours, and making dinner.
My
biggest complaint about this book is also my favorite thing about it -- the
suspense! Samantha has some of the best
cliffhangers in her writing, and not just at the end of chapters (reminiscent
of the TV show 24), but also within
the chapters as well. She also draws out the tension in certain scenes
throughout the novel, which was most evident to me in this quote from Alex’s
point of view.
“He takes a step toward me, towering over
me, the toes of his boots nearly flush with my trainers, leaving a veil of air
between us.”
Along
with the cliffhangers, suspense, and tense moments that are skillfully woven
throughout the story, there are also funny moments that made me laugh out loud.
This was a wonderful story with characters that are easy to relate to, and I
loved that they are young adults, as opposed to the teens that populate many
paranormal romance books today. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy teen and YA fiction
like no other, and practically live in that section at the bookstore where I
work, but it’s nice to have a main character that those of us in our 20’s and
30’s can relate to. This was the beginning of Alex’s story, but as Sam writes,
“This just
gets bloody better and better.”
I will be anxiously awaiting the next book in this series, and I
highly recommend that you read this exciting book to get in on the story at the
beginning, because I can see this series getting HUGE.
“And this is
the exact moment I know everything has changed between us forever. We’ll never
recover from this.”
Thank you Samantha Towle, for inviting me into your wonderful
world, and for giving me as many more books to read as you can write in this series.
I definitely will not recover from
this series!
Rating: 4 out of 5
stars
P.S. If the review
leaves you hungering for more, check out the first chapter FREE on Samantha’s
blog! Be warned, she is a cliffhanger queen!!! J
Melanie
enjoys reading just about anything she can get her hands on, and especially
enjoys YA/Teen Novels, Intermediate Youth Novels, Historical Fiction,
Historical Non-Fiction, Science-Fiction, and Fantasy. She feeds her book
addiction by teaching reading, working at a bookstore, and being a member of
the book club Readers Anonymous. She loves talking to authors and is always
happy to do interviews, and can usually be found either reading, or recommending
books she has already read to students, colleagues, customers, and friends. She
welcomes all other bookworms and book addicts to share the love of books
together.
Find Melanie:
