Review: Strong characters grab the reader.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 10, 2013
I found the storyline at the beginning of this book initially clumsy and a trifle disjointed. However, right from the start it was the characters who caught my attention and kept me reading. The greatest challenge for any author is to create characters with whom a reader may identify and who are sufficiently realistic that they could live in the reader's town, use the same shops or public transport and face the same challenges.Shaw without a doubt achieves this and the reality of the characters is cleverly enough constructed that little snippets of information are gradually fed into the mind of the reader so that increasingly complete mental images are formed.Although the whole vampire genre has been done to death, what makes this book stand out is that the fantasy element of the vampire story is set up in contrast to the very real, gritty existence of a 'normal' young woman of apparently similar age who is battling for survival in the wake of addiction and a community which is gradually dying around her for reasons which the story gradually makes clear.This book is only the first part of a series and I look forward to grabbing the other parts of the ongoing saga. Although this book is short it is well worth the few pence it costs